American drama of the 20th century. Foreign literature of the 20th century (Edited by V.M.

In the dramaturgy of the 1970s, it was easy to carry out a problem-thematic classification. There were production plays, political plays, international plays, etc. The production play at the turn of the 1970s and 80s identified many economic and social problems, although it did not touch upon the fundamentals of the system. By the mid-1980s, the nature of the production play had changed. Industrial conflicts acquire moral content, a person’s personal life merges with his work activity, and the hero’s home and family life becomes a continuation of his production life. This is expressed even in the choice of location: an apartment (“Alone with Everyone” by A. Gelman), a dacha (“Veranda in the Forest” by I. Dvoretsky). The spheres of industrial, social, and personal life are closely intertwined, the hero is known at the intersection of different coordinates.

The tendency towards understanding the spiritual essence of a contemporary that emerged towards the end of the 1970s pushed aside production problems. The social value of a person begins to be measured not only by business qualities, but primarily by the level of moral concepts. This leads to the fact that purely “industrial drama” is no longer found in the 1980s. The plays “Zinulya” by A. Gelman, “Silver Wedding” by A. Misharin, despite the fact that their plot-forming basis is industrial conflicts, are already journalistic conversations about conscience, about personal responsibility, about the relationship between word and deed.

In the early 1980s, plays by playwrights appeared whose similar creative principles made it possible to combine them into “new wave” dramaturgy or post-Vampire dramaturgy. The plays of the “new wave” reflected the duality of life, there was a conversation about the distortion of man as a consequence of social causes. In them, the heroes experienced the tragedy of unbelief and restlessness, a destructive longing for what they themselves were unable to define. L. Petrushevskaya, V. Slavkin, A. Galin, L. Razumovskaya immersed the heroes in everyday life, in everyday life, in some kind of “communal” quarrels. Everyday troubles separated people and made their characters flawed. The playwrights of the “new wave” were also united by the fact that their plays never clearly expressed the author’s position and lacked a positive ideal. The atmosphere of the plays did not give hope for prospects. What is common in post-Vampilov dramaturgy is the attitude towards Chekhov’s theater. “Three Girls in Blue” by L. Petrushevskaya evoked associations with “Three Sisters”; the motives of “The Cherry Orchard” were transformed in the play

V. Arro “Look who came!” and L. Razumovskaya’s “Garden Without Land”, “My Relatives” by A. Smirnov led to “Summer Residents”. But despite the plot similarity, the plays of the “new wave” differed from Chekhov’s in the absence of that highly spiritual atmosphere that raised everyday life in Chekhov’s dramas to the level of existence and made it possible to see the intense work of the soul behind the external eventlessness.

In the early 1980s, playwrights turned to searching for the true reasons for the life dramas of an entire generation. N. Semenova, A. Dudarev, M. Vorfolomeev showed the corrosive atmosphere of lies and hypocrisy, elevated to a state scale. The hero of the late 1980s is inactive, indulges in reflection, and does not commit any actions. In psychological drama, an unusual conflict appears, in which not one character is opposed to another, but the hero is opposed to life (“Ser-so” by V. Slavkin).

The desire to find analogies of modern life in history and to philosophically comprehend some eternal problems causes the development of philosophical drama. One of its talented representatives is E. Radzinsky. His plays are psychological dramas based on various materials, which use the technique of “game within a game” or “play within a play” (“The Old Actress for the Role of Dostoevsky’s Wife”). Thus, in the philosophical play “The Theater of the Times of Nero and Seneca,” the play itself is staged by Nero. Life and play intertwine, creating a tense field of action.

The dramaturgy of the 1980s is so diverse that it is quite difficult to reduce it to several directions. After all, only in the genre of psychological drama, along with the “new wave,” did playwrights of the older generation continue their creative searches - V. Rozov, A. Arbuzov. The plays “The Master”, “The Boar” by V. Rozov, “The Winner”, “The Guilty” by A. Arbuzov, written during this period, revealed unexpected facets of their creativity. They revealed sides of life filled with real drama, where the social and personal were intertwined, where the broken destinies of the young were punishment for the moral crimes of their fathers. Material from the site

In the 1990s, the “chernukha” gradually disappeared from the plays, and writers were less interested in the everyday side of life. Eternal questions begin to sound again: life and death, God and the devil, ends and beginnings, naturalness and artificiality. These problems are posed on somewhat unusual material in the plays “Slingshot”, “Canotier”, “Go Away” by N. Kolyada. In them, the playwright addresses the subconscious, the secret, the struggle of the human soul and flesh.

Since the mid-1980s, the traditions of the theater of the absurd, founded by the Oberiuts, have been revived in Russian drama. A. Kazantsev’s “Evgenia’s Dreams” and A. Demyanenko’s “I also want to go to the ball, take me with you” address the paradoxical theater.

At the end of the 1980s, the aesthetics of postmodernism were realized in Russian drama. Postmodern drama is built on the deconstruction of signs and symbols of the culture of socialist realism. These include plays by V. Sorokin “In the Dugout”, “Dumplings”, M. Ugarov “Newspaper “Russian Invalid” for July 18”, A. Shipenko “Octopus Garden”.

In dramaturgy at the end of the 20th century, there is a process of searching for new forms and developing old genres in traditional and postmodern systems.

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On this page there is material on the following topics:

• Russian dramas of the 20th century
• 20th century Russian playwrights
• Russian drama of the 20th century
• dramaturgy of the late 20th century
• drama analysis by v.arro

2. Russian drama of the 20th century, from Gorky to Vampilov. Development trends. Names and genres

30 years The First Congress of Soviet Writers was important in understanding the tasks and direction of drama. By the beginning of the 30s. Most literary groups were dispersed or disbanded. The resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks “On the restructuring of literary arts organizations” (1932) stated this fact, citing the fact that existing literary arts organizations are hindering the serious scope of arts. creativity. An Organizing Committee was created for the preparation of the All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers, headed by Gorky, and in 1934 this congress took place. At the congress, the Charter of the Union was adopted, which declared that socialist realism, the main method of literature, allows the artist to show creative initiative and gives him the opportunity to choose a variety of forms, styles and genres. The charter required writers to stage productions. works of tasks of ideological reworking and education of working people in the spirit of socialism. From that time on, the principles of socialist realism began to be intensively introduced into the consciousness of both writers and readers, and a broad campaign was launched to praise the new creative method as the pinnacle in the worst development of mankind. But most of these principles are actually bad. had nothing to do with creativity. These were organizational and ideological guidelines. In the newspapers one could read about the opening of new magazines: “Znamya” (1931), “International Literature” (1933). The main feature of lit. movements of the 30s - the predominance of the epic principle in all types of creativity, reflected primarily in the craving for large canvases. Gorky, A. Tolstoy, Sholokhov. Ideological problems of plays of the first half of the 30s. Modernity comes to the fore. The theme of socialist creation, the creative labor of the masses, occupies a large place - a theme that was just emerging in the 20s. Plays by N. Pogodin: “Temp” (1929), “Poem about an Ax” (1930), “My Friend” (1933). V. Kataev “Time, forward!”, “N. Nikitin "Firing Line". "Sot" by Leonid Leonov. The playwrights showed in Soviet people a new, socialist attitude towards work, their vested interest in the success and growth of social life. industry, a sense of ownership of the business, etc. Along with plays about the working class, there were also plays about the birth of the collective farm village, about the party’s struggle for collectivization of agriculture: “Bread” by V. Kirshon, “After the Ball” by N. Pogodin, a dramatization of “Virgin Soil Upturned” by M. Sholokhov. Dramaturgy did not forget to turn to the recent past - the era of the Civil War. These are plays such as “The First Horse” and “optimistic tragedy” by Vsevolod Vishnevsky. A number of the plays were devoted to the theme of the intelligentsia, the struggle on the ideological front. For example, “Fear” by A. Afinogenov. Disputes about the principles of depicting a new hero. Some writers are for the mass character of literature, against psychologism. The other part is for individualization, for in-depth psychological revelation of characters. There was also a debate about whether it was possible to convey the new content of reality in its entirety and reflect social life. transformation of the country, creatively using old techniques, or an immediate and decisive breakdown of all old forms and destruction of the structure of traditional drama is necessary. Many felt the discrepancy between the new content and the old forms (Vishnevsky, Pogodin). They rejected the supposedly exhausted traditions of Chekhov, Ostrovsky, Ibsen and others. They opposed psychologism and were in favor of depicting the masses. People like Afinogenov and Kirshon still wanted to creatively assimilate old ones on the way to new forms.

Drama by Alexandra Vampilov and Alexander Valentinovich Vampilov (1937-1972). Born in the Irkutsk region into a teacher’s family, he graduated from the philological department of Irkutsk University. He began publishing while still a student in a youth newspaper. In 1961 he published a book of short stories, “A Coincidence of Circumstances.” Then he began to write plays. The plays “Duck Hunt” and “Last Summer in Chulimsk” were published in the anthology “Angara”. The New World did not accept them, despite Tvardovsky’s personal disposition towards him. V. Rozov: “Almost every play by Vampilov begins as a vaudeville or farce, and then reaches extreme dramatic tension.” Vampilov became the author of only six plays, about 60 short stories, essays and feuilletons, which can easily be combined in one volume (11 years of literary activity). His plays are always about the time in which he lives (late 60s), and about the people who experience this time with him. At the time of their creation, the plays staged on the stage of the Bolshoi Drama Theater in Leningrad were perceived as highly relevant. However, contemporary critics of Vampilov noted that for him the social content of life, its external, active side, turned out to be unimportant. He was reproached for his predilection for depicting inactive, but constantly intensely thinking heroes. Indeed, the plot side of Vampilov’s dramaturgy is weakened, but this is not its drawback, but its undoubted advantage: placing the process of human thinking at the center of the narrative, he acted as an innovative playwright. The conflict of his plays is also specific. It should not be sought in the confrontation of heroes or groups of characters, for it is contained in the soul of one of them - the hero placed at the center. However, the distinction between main and secondary characters in plays is not so clear. Who, for example, is the main character of the early Vampilov play "Farewell in June" (1965) ? - Bukin, who is guilty of the breakup with Masha and is experiencing its consequences, or Kolesov, who sacrificed his feelings for Tanya in order to obtain a diploma and enter graduate school? Vampilov’s heroes are always people with complex characters, looking for and not finding themselves in the world, and sometimes noticing the loss of something very important in themselves. The playwright’s focus on purely “human” issues was noted by V. Rasputin: “It seems that the main question that Vampilov constantly asks: will you, a man, remain a man?” Vampilov’s heroes are often people around thirty who have reached the stage of preliminary summing up. They are extraordinary by nature, but something often prevents them from realizing this originality. These are the heroes of the already mentioned play “Farewell in June.” Many of them have a common quality - they are not satisfied with the measured flow of life, they crave an event or a word that can add dynamics to their everyday existence. Tanya, the daughter of rector Repnikov, rebels against the external well-being of her parents' home. At his own wedding, Bukin talks about himself in the third person - he plays. The unexpected in a seemingly realistic drama. His heroes do not live, but play with life, challenging reality, trying to create their own analogue of reality. They are somewhat cynics, but still hope that there is still a place on earth where they can be themselves. Change of space? A typical impulse for the youth of the 60s was to go to Siberia, to the youth “construction projects of the century.” Gomyra is looking for solitude in Siberia, a road to herself. Gomyra’s desire is dictated not by the desire to find an external goal, but by the impossibility of opposing it with something of one’s own. And the feeling of fatigue that Vampilov captures in his hero becomes a constant characteristic of Vampilov’s characters, a characteristic that passes from play to play: Zilov speaks about fatigue from “Duck Hunt”. In the play “Farewell in June,” Vampilov gave a fairly simple rationale for “fatigue syndrome.” It was perceived by him as the result of a clash between “elders” and “younger”, the impossibility of achieving understanding between “fathers” and “children”. “Elders” are concerned with maintaining comfort and maintaining external appearance. Repnikov, Tanya's father. It is revealed in private communication - within the family, in a conversation at home about Kolesov’s expulsion from the institute. He is kindly cold towards his wife, whose inner world is uninteresting to him, irritable, does not accept reproaches, does not take Tanya’s sympathy for Kolesov into account and, without listening to him, insists on ending contacts between them. It is said about Repnikov that he is “an administrator and a bit of a scientist - for the sake of authority”; he is the bearer of administrative consciousness, which requires making everything in life clear and regulated. Without a doubt, he exchanges Kolesov’s diploma for Tanya’s love. Another representative of the older generation is Zolotuev. His fate is different from Repnikov's. But this is also a life lived in vain. Existence for oneself, hoarding, which has become the norm.

He set himself the goal of proving to himself and the world the absence of honest people: “Where is the honest person?.. An honest person is one who is given little. You need to give so much that the person cannot refuse, and then he will definitely take it. The auditor did not take 20 thousand, Zolotuev’s hopes were not justified, his life lost its meaning, “shattered,” and therefore, at his last appearance in the play, “he looked torn.” In this play there is hope for the possibility of the existence of honest, integral individuals, although there is also the complexity of human characters, and symptoms of fatigue are noted - the “disease” of the generation, which A. Vampilov himself called “lost.” Vampilov precisely recorded in his plays that irreversible loss of integrity of nature, optimism, faith in people. "Duck Hunt" (1970) - the most famous play by A. Vampilov - the idyllic ending becomes impossible. Its hero Zilov is a typical Vampilov character, personifying the “lost” generation. Faith was trampled upon. Man was faced with the need to seek support in himself, without having the necessary spiritual filling for this. Zilov’s social maturation occurred in the 60s. He, who has lived through an era of hopes and disappointments, is about thirty years old. He is a man with a broken soul, devoid of internal integrity. This is indicated by the first author's remark dedicated to him: “he is quite tall, of strong build; in his gait and harsh manner of speaking there is a lot of freedom, which comes from confidence in his physical usefulness. At the same time, in his gait, and in gestures, and in conversation there is a certain carelessness and boredom about him, the origin of which cannot be determined at first glance.” Zilov bears the traits of marginality, which is also typical of the playwright’s heroes: Zilov is a native of a remote Siberian town. The impression of the hero’s duality is aggravated by the music, which unmotivatedly changes its character throughout the play: “Peppy music suddenly turns into mournful music.” The space of the play is the space of the city, localized and confined within the framework of an apartment and a cafe. This closed space rhymes with the hero himself, this is a moment of characterization of the hero, who is also closed in on himself. The state of the world in the play is likened to the state of the character. Thus, at the beginning of the play, “through the window you can see the top floor and roof of a typical house opposite. Above the roof is a narrow strip of gray sky. It’s a rainy day.” In the finale, enlightenment occurs in the hero’s soul and in nature, but there is still no way out into the world beyond the “I”: “By this time, the rain outside the window has passed, a strip of sky is turning blue, and the roof of the neighboring house is illuminated by the dim afternoon sun.” In the play, Zilov rebels against the monotony of life, of which the city becomes a sign here. The world in “Duck Hunt” subjugates Zilov. He does not accept lies in others, but he himself often lies. His attitude to work is evidenced by the fact that he is ready to make a report on the work of a non-existent enterprise. A typical situation in Vampil's plays: play replaces life. The relationship between fiction and reality in "Duck Hunt". First, the friends act out Zilov's death, then the game almost ends with his suicide. The intended joke is cruel from the start. The inscription on the wreath should be taken ironically. Zilov also questions family feelings. Having received a letter from his father asking him to come, he says: “Let's see what the old fool writes<...>He will send such letters to all ends and lie there, like a dog, waiting." The father's premonition of death turns out to be a reality. The fact that Zilov does not believe the word of anyone, even the closest person, is not only his fault. Time has demonstrated the discrepancy between word and deed. And literature In the 60s, she came to the realization that behind the word there may not be true reality. The image of Kushak, like Zilov, bears signs of duality: “In his institution, at work, he is a rather impressive person: strict, decisive and businesslike. Outside the institution, he is very unsure of himself, indecisive and fussy." However, the duality of the heroes is different. In the case of Zilov, it is proof of the complexity of human character. Zilov does not allow himself to be regarded as a positive or negative hero. The duality of the Sash is a sign of his lack of integrity and the worthlessness of his actions and decisions "Behind his ostentatious decency lies depravity. He discusses the unethicality of visiting in the absence of his wife, who has gone on vacation, and at the same time easily agrees to an affair with Vera, provoked by Zilov. Zilov, unable to overcome the spiritual crisis on his own, arouses the author's interest and sympathy. People those who live a measured, regulated life are not objects of the author's sympathy. Pilot Kudimov. The expectation of the hunt, with the help of which Zilov hopes to become himself, is also perceived as playful in the play. The hunt cannot take place in principle, because a return to the origins of life's path is also impossible, to the freshness of perception of the world. The explanation for this is both in the hero and outside of him, in the era at the turn of the 60s - 70s, in which “those who once lived, inspired by the idea of ​​confrontation or overcoming, were filled with this - stumbled, if not to emptiness, then to lack of demand." Zilov is the only hero of the play who acutely experiences the loss of his soul, saying goodbye to his former self. His trouble is that he himself is infected by the era, unable to resist it. It turns out that the hero’s drama does not come from a collision with reality, but, on the contrary, from non-collision with it, from the gradual transformation of life into everyday life.

Vamipilov's plays, together with Shukshin's stories, brought into the literature of the late 60s a mood of confusion, understanding of a dead end, the futility of efforts to live on. The spiritual fulfillment of Vampilov's heroes was not enough to live a harmonious inner life. Not having the opportunity and not knowing how to realize themselves, his heroes replace life with a game. Good, the bearer of which is, for example, Sarafanov (“The Eldest Son”), in Vampilov’s artistic world, is still an exception, but an exception that retains its creative power.

7.3.The image of the narrator in his relation to the image of the author in the linguistic composition of the text The image of the narrator appears in narrative texts in cases where the story is not told directly “from the author”, but is transmitted to some person - the narrator. From 2nd half. 18th century in Russian This technique has developed very widely in literature. Chulkova's pretty cook, Pushkin's Grinev, Panko Gogol's Rudy, etc. Vinogradov wrote: “The narrator is the speech creation of the writer, and the image of the narrator (who pretends to be the author) is a form of the writer’s literary artistry. The image of the author is seen in him as the image of an actor in the stage image he creates.” The image of the narrator is created by the author and therefore does not exclude or cross out the image of the author.

Moreover, author's image is present in the composition of the work along with the image of the narrator, but in the compositional hierarchy occupies the highest level stands above the image of the narrator. The cementing force, the core around which the entire stylistic system of the work is grouped is the image of the author. The relationship between the image of the author and the image of the narrator may be different, but there are two main aspects of this relationship: 1) the degree of closeness or distance between the image of the narrator and the image of the author and 2) the variety of “faces” in which the author can appear, conveying the story to the narrator. There are works in which the image of the narrator is close to the image of the author in language and view of the world (point of view) - most of Paustovsky’s stories, and there are works where the image of the narrator is clearly distant

We must remember that the “I” in a narrative work (prose or poetry) clearly indicates the image of the narrator. No personal similarities or biographical coincidences change the matter. The author can make anyone the narrator, incl. and himself. But in the composition of the work it will still be the image of the narrator.

The forms of manifestation of the different faces of the author are diverse. It is not uncommon to find narrative compositions that feature multiple narrators. For example, the hero of our time has three narrators: a young traveler, M.M. and Pechorin himself. But the author changes his faces within one work, not only passing the narrative from one narrator to another, but also revealing different masks of one or another narrator.

In terms of verbal composition, there is a certain point from which the author or narrator sees everything depicted. In this sense, it is more accurate to talk about point of vision . Two concepts have long been associated with the image of the author: omniscience and objectivity. Objectivity acts only as a conditional ideal, and not as the author’s complete detachment from the events or phenomena depicted. Omniscience. A real author cannot have omniscience in reality. But by creating the world of literary reality, he can implement such “principles of constructing the image of the author” that will make the author’s omniscience the initial principle of the organization of the text. We see this when we deal with the author’s narration in the 3rd person. This is a convention of literary reality, a rule of the game accepted by all. The point of vision is located above the depicted events and phenomena, the point of vision is “above”.

The narrator's point of view is different from the point of view of the author who narrates from

3 faces. The narrator can only tell from what he witnessed, what he saw and heard. Although such a story loses in the breadth of coverage of reality, it gains to a certain extent in authenticity. The compositional framework of first-person POV is quite cramped, and authors often have to expand them using different techniques. Eavesdropping on conversations in Cap. daughter.

Despite all the fundamental differences in the author’s points of view in the story from 3 liters. and the narrator in the appearance from 1 liters, they can become closer in the sense of the appearance of elements of the narrator’s omniscience if he approaches the image of the author. Chekhov. Person in case

Ways of expressing the image of the narrator. OR is expressed most clearly by pronouns and verb forms of 1st century. But OR can also be designated in the form of 3 liters.

In this case, OR finds expression in linguistic systems. These are most often colloquial and colloquial words, expressions and syntactic constructions, as well as dialectisms and professionalisms. In some In cases, OR can be expressed using book elements. Can be expressed by OR and point of view. This way of expressing OR is the most subtle, not immediately noticeable, but artistically expressive. For example, Bunin's story The Killer. No omniscience at all. A singing voice tells. Everything else is what an eyewitness could observe.

Ticket 8

Gag. Early 20th century – search for something new in dramaturgy. Firstly, the theater itself has been updated: the acting theater (everything is built around the prima actor) is replaced by a director. theater (Stanisl. and German-Danchenko, Moscow Art Theater, 1897).

Formation modernist theater associated with the name Vsev. Emilievich Meyerhold. He began his acting and directing career with Stanislavsky, but quickly separated from him. In 1906, actress V.F. Komissarzhevskaya invited him to St. Petersburg as chief. dir. of your theater. During the 1st season, Meyerhold staged 13 performances, including Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler,” L. Andreev’s “A Man’s Life,” and A. Blok’s “Showroom.” After leaving the Komissarzhevskaya Theater, in 1907 - 1917. Meyerhold worked in St. Petersburg. emperor theaters, participated in small studio, including amateur, home productions. In the book “On the Theater” (1913), Meyerhold theoretically. substantiated the concept of “conventional theater”, counterpoint. scenic naturalism.

At the beginning of the century, two main types of drama can be distinguished. development trends: realistic and modernist (symbolic, allegorical) drama. However, despite all their dissimilarity, what unites them is that both are dramas of ideas. The works of playwrights of this time reflect the processes taking place in European culture. dramaturgy. You can say (this is all a gag, please note! I do not pretend to be the ultimate truth) that its development and transformation into Russian. stage received the Ibsen Theater (realistic - Gorky, Chekhov, however, is also still staged: 1898 - “The Seagull”) and the Maeterlinck Theater (symbolist - Andreev, Blok, Tsvetaeva).

Gorky's dramaturgy ("At the Lower Depths", "Bourgeois", "Summer Residents", "Enemies", etc.).

From the beginning 90s Gorky revealed himself as a playwright: the plays “The Bourgeois” (1902), “At the Lower Depths” (1902), “Summer Residents” (1905), “Children of the Sun” (1905), “Barbarians” (1906), “Enemies” (1906) ), “Vassa Zheleznova” (1910). Plays of the late period - “Egor Bulychov and others” (1932), “Dostigaev and others” (1933), the second version of “Vassa Zheleznova” (1936).

The pinnacle of dramatic creativity - the play “At the Lower Depths”, owes its fame to a great extent to the production of K. S. Stanislavsky at the Moscow Art Theater (1902; played by Stanislavsky, V. I. Kachalov, I. M. Moskvin, O. L. Knipper- Chekhov, etc.) In 1903, the performance “At the Lower Depths” with Richard Wallentin in the role of Satin took place at the Berlin Kleines Theater. Gorky's other plays - "The Bourgeois" (1901), "Summer Residents" (1904), "Children of the Sun", "Barbarians" (both 1905), "Enemies" (1906) - did not have such sensational success in Russia and Europe.

"At the Bottom" (1902)- not an everyday play, but a drama of ideas. The author depicts emptiness, cat. humanity is falling, finding its last refuge “at the bottom” of life. A person is still covered with the “rags” of previous meanings and concepts and clings to them with all his might. Each character wears a mask, hiding their inner emptiness behind memories. The inside of the shelter is warmer than the outside, but this comfort does not last long. Many characters do not have names - they have nicknames (Actor, Baron). The Baron's past raises doubts; he describes it soullessly; perhaps he was a lackey, not a nobleman. The story of Nastya sounds like a beautiful fairy tale in the style of a “cruel romance”. Everyone is afraid to take off their masks. As long as there is a past, there is an appearance of a person. The play develops two storylines in parallel: one on stage (murder plot, etc.) The second is the unmasking of masks, revealing the essence of a person. The baron is afraid to be a “just a man”, and he does not recognize Luka as one. The climax occurs when Luka and Satine, traditionally considered hostile characters, meet. But Satin even sympathizes with the old man, who “was lying only out of pity for you.” But still he is not satisfied with Luke’s lies. Here the dual attitude of G himself to truth is revealed - “truth-truth” and “truth-dream”; these types not only have no connection, they are hostile. Satin's myth about Man (Man in the Void) is born against the backdrop of the spiritual emptiness of all humanity. Nobody understands each other, everyone is busy only with themselves. Thus, Satin also lies, but his lie, unlike Luke’s lie, has a justification not in the past, but in the future - in the perspective of conciliar humanity. Just no guarantees that it will happen :). Satin knows no other way out. Luke is trying to reconcile the “divine” and the “human,” which in the author’s eyes is a lie, but possible for a sick person like Anna. Gorky makes Luka disappear in the midst of the conflict; G is not on his side. Thus, G removes the last obstacles to the final truth that Luke puts. And this truth is the loneliness of Man. "The Bourgeois" (1902) theme of philistinism and tense anticipation of the future. New people are actively attacking the way of life of the townspeople. G, following Chekhov, refuses intrigue and unusual situations. Conflict brews in everyday life; it is a confrontation of ideological concepts. Lagrue of the bourgeoisie is opposed by Nile, a man confident in his strength, in the right to change life and order. In his arr. G wanted to show the type of Russian working man, cat. greedily reaches out to knowledge and action. Neil's love of life is shared by democratically minded intellectuals - Shishkin and Tsvetaeva. The characters are characterized not only with ideological, but also with philosophical and aesthetic views. Neil is an optimist. Tatyana and Peter are pessimists; the future seems to them as bleak as the present. The protest of the third group of characters - the singing Grouse and the "free bird catcher" - is limited to denial.

L. Andreev. Dramaturgy.

L. Andreev (1871-1919) graduated from the law department of Moscow University. He suffered from heavy drinking. First he writes feuilletons and stories for "Courier" and "Orlovsky Vestnik". He was friends with Gorky, cat. Andreev and “opened” it, then he quarreled. Oct. roar A. did not accept, he left for Filand. There are attempts to attribute Andreev to different movements (symbolism, realism, romanticism, early expressionism), but his work is synthetic. character. Andreev's plays: “Savva” (1906), “To the Stars” (1906), “The Life of a Man” (1907), “Tsar Hunger” (1908), “Days of Our Lives” (1908), “Anatema” (1910), “Ocean” (1911), “Ekaterina Ivanovna” (1913), “Thought” (1914), “The One Who Gets Slapped” (1916), “Requiem” (1917), etc.

"A Man's Life". A very strange play. Plot: there is Someone in Gray. He holds a candle, which symbolizes the Life of a Man - while the candle is burning, the person is alive. Someone in Gray always stands in the darkest corner, holds a candle and sometimes inserts comments from the series: " He doesn’t know that tomorrow this and that will happen.” Everyone prays to this corner and speaks into it, cursing fate. But no one except the Old Women sees it. It all begins with the birth of a Man. Behind the scenes, the Man’s mother screams and suffers, and Old women sit and argue - will he die or not? There are five old women. They appear at the birth and death of a Man. In the second picture we see the already married Ch., who lives in poverty with his Wife. From the dialogue of the neighbors we learn that the spouses have nothing to eat, but they nice. The neighbors leave them bread and milk. From the dialogue between Ch. and J. we learn that he is an architect looking for work. They dream of fame, food, a big house. Ch. challenges fate (in the corner). J. prays ( in the corner) about wealth for her husband. Someone in black says that they don’t know - this morning they were already interested in Ch’s drawings. Scene 3: Ch’s wealth. A ball in his house, everything is very good. symbolically: guests, cat. they repeat “beautiful, rich, light”, friends with proud heads, ugly enemies. We learn that Ch now has a son and a house with 15 rooms and 7 servants. Scene 4: misfortune Ch. The same house - impoverished and destroyed. Among the servants - the old cook, the cat. he says that there is no money, but someone hit the master’s son on the head with a stone and the guy dies. Ch. and his Zh. pray on their knees, asking for life for their son. From prayer Ch we learn that he lost not only money, but also talent, but even then he did not ask for anything. The son is dying. Ch. curses fate, himself, rock - everything. And he says that now fate cannot do anything to him - he supposedly doesn’t care. Scene 5: death of Ch. Kabak, drunkard. Ch. is sleeping at the table. From the dialogue of the drunkards we learn that Zh died. The candle barely burns. The old women are coming, beginning. remember the life of Ch. Then the light goes out. Ch. shouts: “Where is my sword?” and dies. Someone in gray says: "Hush. The man is dead." All.

Symbolism. As it is not difficult to guess, Someone is fate, fate, impassive and incomprehensible. A man came from nowhere and will go nowhere. The feet of Ch.'s life mean nothing, they are simply defined. the compositional structure of the play is a series of generalized fragments. The world of the play is a conditional reality, in a cat. there are conditioned thoughts and feelings. Emotions and feelings are always contrasting, and Andreev’s hyperbole is based on this. Very large remarks with a bunch of descriptions (from the “impossible white color” series, etc.), and often moralizing ones. The language is sublime, apparently suggesting his detachment from reality. Contemporaries saw the play as a petty-bourgeois drama and reproached A for not being able to fully adhere to the “conventionality” of the play.

Block. Lyrical cycle. dramas: “Showcase”, “King in the Square”, “Stranger” - 1906, “Song of Fate” 1908, “Rose and Cross” (1913).

“Balaganchik” (1906) is a play of disappointment (in symbolist mysticism). Based on the same thing. verse Blok was encouraged to write the play by G. Chulkov, who later explained Blok’s play as “the despair of a doubter.” Lyric. doubt and high skepticism are symbolized. the image of Harlequin, which has already appeared in “Poems about a Beautiful Lady”. The symbolists saw in the play a mockery of their innermost dreams and hopes: The mystics in the play await a universal event - the arrival of the “Pale Friend” and express themselves in parodied symbolist cliches. poetry. After "B." Blok’s relationship with A. Bely completely deteriorated.

Drama after the revolution.

Heroic folk drama of the 20s: “Yarovaya Love” by K. Trenev, “Razlom” by Lavrenev, “Optimistic. tragedy" by Vishnevsky.

Time to advance its own requirements both for prose and poetry, and for drama. It was required to give monumental. reproducing the struggle of the people, etc. New features of the Soviet dramaturgy with the most distinctly incarnate. in the heroic genre. adv. dramas (although there were also melodramas with revolutionary content: A. Faiko “Lake Lul”, D. Smolin “Ivan Kozyr and Tatyana Russkikh”). For heroic folk drama of the 20s. character two trends: the tendency towards romanticism and allegorical. conventions. Well, the definition of “heroic.” folk drama" speaks for itself. Essentially, a drama about heroes from the people. Heroes sacrifice love, life and all that stuff to the people. people are brought onto the stage in large numbers, sometimes even too large (the conflict is most often based on classes. Contradictions of the era, characters are mostly generalized, in allegorical dramas tending to symbols or allegorical figures, heroics intertwined -sya with satire (“Let Dunka into Europe” - a phrase from Trenev’s play “Lyubov Yarovaya”), the folk language (however, it is deliberately coarsened, just like the language of enemies - deliberately emasculated). Of the plays under consideration, the first two can be be attributed to “romantic” folk dramas, and “Optimistic Tragedy” bears clear features of an allegorical tendency.

K. Trenev. “Yarovaya Love” (1926). Kr. content. The action took place. in a small a southern town that alternates between whites and reds. During the play, first the city is red, then white, and then red again. At the center of the action is the story of Lyubov Yarovaya, a teacher who considers her revolutionary husband dead. However, he turned out to be alive, but went over to the side of the whites. Under the name Vikhor, Mikhail Yarovoy pretends to be a commissar and spies at the Red headquarters. In addition to him, the mischievous Elisatov and the typist Pavel Petrovna Panova are at the headquarters. A peculiar figure is the watchman Chir, speaking in quotations from Scripture. When the city is captured. white, Lyubov Yarovaya organizes underground. work, tries to save the Red Army soldiers from the gallows (Red Army men: the novel Koshkin - Commissar; sailor Shvandya, a tongue-tied creature with ideas about the revolution and the proletariat close to Platonov’s heroes, claims that he is personally familiar with “Marx”; assistant commissars Khrushch, Grozny and Mazukhin ), distributes weapons to the people, in short, a progressive woman. She meets her husband and is horrified that he betrayed the ideals of the revolution. The husband persuades L.Ya. joins him, loves her very much, does not dare to arrest her and hand her over to the authorities, although he knows perfectly well what the little wife is doing. L.Ya. on the contrary, he sacrifices his husband for the sake of the revolution, and when the Red Army men take him away under white hands, he says: “No, I am only a faithful comrade from now on.” In addition to the clearly white and clearly red presences in the play. somewhat satirical. characters: Dunka the speculator (she should be allowed into Europe), the Gornostaev couple: a bourgeois wife and a professor husband, absent-minded, but valuable to the owls. authorities, so in the end they give him a safe conduct (some kind of mandate or certificate, I don’t remember) and leave him in Sovetsk. republic. It is Professor Shvandya, who got into trouble (he talks about the revolution in front of the wrong people), passes off as Karl Marx and, having muddled the minds of the townsfolk, runs away. The Whites are persistently hunting for Roman Koshkin, whom they dream of hanging from a lantern. But they can't do anything. They are driven away.

Sun. Ivanov. "Armored train 14-62" (1927). (This is instead of "Breach"). Kr. content. The action took place. in Siberia. 1 action. Captain Nezelasov and ensign. Both are preparing to send an armored train to help the Americans. and Japanese landing and the “white squads of the Holy Cross”, which invaded. city ​​(like, it is necessary to finally suppress the uprising led by Peklevanov, the chairman of the revolutionary committee). Nezelasov is also being pursued. goal: when the Americans occupy Siberia, to take the place of General Spassky, to become the most important after the Americans. Therefore, the armored train is being repaired just as it was sent to the taiga. Chairman Revolutionary Committee Peklevanov met at the pier with Nikita Vershinin, whose children were killed by Amer. The Japanese burned the house too. They talked. a heart-to-heart, and Vershinin agrees to stand at the head of the uprising (he accepts a revolver from Peklevanov, a “mandate,” as Peklevanov calls him). The heroic will join the uprising. Chinese Xing Bing-wu, indignant at the fact that “American, Japanese, China is screwed.” Act 2. An armored train with whites and refugees stopped at a railway station in the taiga: somewhere nearby the rebels cut off the telegraph. wires, it is unknown whether to expect help from the Americans, whether the bridge is guarded, the Cossacks were killed, the signalmen fled. Refugees are worried. While Nezelasov was trying to resolve the problems, Shin Bing-wu appeared at the station, selling sunflower seeds, sort of. Obab finally receives a dispatch that the Americans will not come, they are being attacked by Vershinin, that the troops of General Golovanov are defeated, and Lieutenant General. Sakharov escaped. Nezelasov just can’t figure out who his boss is now (he slightly shifts his mind: “I’m a dictator! I’m saving Russia!.. Me!.. Me!..” The armored train set off for the bridge to connect with the Americans. At this time, Vershinin is arming reinforcements, sending some against the Americans, some against the whites. The Chinese come running, reporting that an armored train is on its way to help the Americans. Vershinin responds to him: like, everything is ok, I’ve already sent demolitions there , there will soon be no bridge. And sure enough, the roar of an explosion can be heard in the distance. People are having fun, Znobov, a member of the revolutionary committee, a railway worker, arrives. A spontaneous rally. At the height of the rally, a peasant brings a sympathetic American who curses imperialism and praises the Soviets. In short, the pathos is inspiring - "I am growing, and at the peak, one might say, of the celebration, a man appeared with a bandage on his cheek. He came from the bridge. They did not reach the bridge, the Americans and Cossacks dug in there, and the explosion - the others accidentally blew themselves up. Vershinin is furious Having shot a man, he leads everyone to the railway embankment to attack the armored train. Act 3. Vershinin and his rebels are on the embankment, thinking about how to stop the train. Someone comes up with the idea that they need to put down a dead carcass: there is such an order to slow down if there is a carcass or a person on the tracks. No one has a carcass in their bosom, so people are trying to decide who will go on the rails. First Vershinin himself breaks down, then his assistant Vaska Ham, then Sin Bing-woo lies down. The Chinese dies, but the partisans manage to shoot the driver and wound the assistant. Nezelasov and Obab try to fight back, but it’s too late. Nezelasov shoots himself, Obaba is captured by the partisans. Student Misha knows how to drive steam locomotives, takes the place of the driver, and Vershinin’s detachment travels to the city on an armored train. 4 action. Peklevanov is hiding in a Chinese fanza (a house like this). He is spied on by a Japanese man who is supposedly trading boom. with flowers, and “dressed as if he were selling silk,” as Peklevanov’s wife notes. Activists led by Znobov come to Peklevanov and discuss a plan for an uprising in the city. Then the members of the Revolutionary Committee quietly make their move, and a Japanese man comes to Peklevanov’s wife, pursues Peklevanov and kills him on the street (behind the stage), and Peklevanov’s wife shoots the Jap. Workers at the depot are preparing for an uprising. Peklevanov’s wife enters, followed by the body of her murdered husband. The workers start an uprising in the depot, and news comes from the fortress: the Japs and Americans are being beaten there too. And then an armored train arrives under a red flag: this is Vershinin. Peklevanov’s body is carried onto an armored train, and with Peklevanov instead of a flag, the people go to the fortress to finish off the invaders.

V. Vishnevsky. “Optimistic. tragedy". A later play, 1932, staged in 1933, published. in “New World”, in 1933. Then it was staged not only in the USSR, but also in Czechoslovakia. (1936), and in Spain (1937). A lot of pathos, “mighty delight”, pompous, grandiose and very pompous. The characters are very generalized. In addition to the action, the figures of the first leader and the second leader, the first foreman and the second foreman, who periodically glorify the fleet, are brought out as sort of reasoners of a strange type: they do not sum up the action, but make speeches, as at a rally. In general, we can say that the aesthetics of a parade and a marketplace are combined here. processions, rallies and allegorical. dramas. The drama confronts two forces: the power of the soviets and anarchy (anarchist tendencies were strong in the navy after the revolution, remember the uprising in Kronstadt). The protrusion personifies the power of the Soviets. The Commissioner (she is also a woman!) + Finn Vaikonen and another group of comrades, the personification of anarchy - Leader, Siply and Alexey (however, Alexey will later go over to the side of the authorities). Contents To the ship where the owner is. Leader, appointed commander from the former royal officers and a commissar from the Bolsheviks. Her task is to organize a battalion of sailors. The sailors at first mock her and want to sleep with her, but the commissar sweetly shoots one of them in the stomach, and the sailors calm down. Moreover, the Leader forbids them to touch the woman. The captain is also not immediately accepted, they think that he might betray. The Leader is in charge of all these chaotic affairs, and he has strengthened them. his power through violence: on the accusation of the old woman, his henchmen throw overboard the sailor who allegedly stole her wallet, and then, when the wallet was in the old woman’s pocket, they throw her overboard too. They shoot captured officers who return from the Germans. captivity, moreover, they want to serve the Soviets, and in addition, 1 of them is deaf. The last execution overwhelms the patience of the communists, the Leader is shot, and the anarchists who came to his aid are put in line. A battalion of sailors fights as infantry, on land, against the Germans. At night they set up a patrol: Sippy + Vaikonen. Siply is a syphilitic and an anarchist. He kills Vaikonen and escapes. The Germans attack. the battalion, part of the sailors and the commissar are in captivity, the commander and his part of the battalion are fighting. In short, the Germans take the commissioner away for interrogation. There she is tortured to death, at this time Alexey and other prisoners are playing for time, pretending to be fools in front of the Priest, then the commander comes with his piece of the battalion, everyone is released, but the commissar dies in their arms. And now, in order not to be unfounded regarding pathos, I will give the last remark (this is just a remark! !!): “The motive almost freezes. He froze. The Commissioner is dead. The regiment bared its head. The sailors stand in the height of their nerves and strength - courageous. The sun is reflected in the eyes. The golden names of the ships sparkle. The silence was broken by a musical call. Regimental rhythms. They call for battle, they are powerful, they are understandable and do not cause hesitation. It is a naked, trembling rush and jubilant six-gun salvoes soaring over the plains, the Alps and the Pyrenees. Everything lives. Dust sparkles in the morning sun. Countless creatures live. Everywhere there is movement, rustling, beating and trembling of inexhaustible life. Delight rises in the chest at the sight of a world giving birth to people who spit in the face of the old lie about the fear of death. The arteries are pulsating. Like the flow of great rivers, flooded with light, like the overwhelming grandiose forces of nature, terrible in their growth, there come sounds, already cleared of melody, raw, rough, colossal - the roars of cataclysms and streams of life.”

And now everyone’s chest has risen in delight, we’re all spitting and roaring cataclysmically 

In addition, there is a satirical play. There are many reasons for satire, especially the bourgeois, the bureaucrat and the common man are unlucky.

Satirical plays by Mayakovsky. "Mystery-buff" 1918, 2nd ed. – 1920. Premiere – 21. At first they refused to stage and print “such rubbish.” I'm ready to subscribe, by the way. A play in verse. There are: 7 pairs of pure (bourgeois-nationalists), 7 pairs of unclean (Red Army Man, Laundress, etc. - international proletarians), a Menshevik compromiser, a lady with a dog (emigrant), devils, angels, people. future, smart tools and products. In the prologue, the author simply and clearly explains the essence of the play: the metaphysical flood of the revolution sweeps away everything in its path. There is a hole in the north pole, and it flows out from there. As one bourgeois remarked: “the dawn has become too angry, scarlet... then how will it spill! the streets are pouring... in the blast furnaces of the revolution, the whole world is fused in one waterfall.” 14 no. and 14 pure ones sit at the Pole. They decide to build an ark. The proletarians are building. They enter the ark. There is nothing to eat, the proletarians caught fish, the bourgeoisie don’t know how. They choose a king and take away everything from the prolet. But the king himself devoured everything. They decide to organize a republic, everything is gobbled up by the bourgeoisie. In general, they were thrown overboard. They are sitting, swollen with hunger. Chel comes. future. And he says: there is in heaven, beyond hell and paradise, a promised land, where there is a lot of everything. Flight. rushing in there. Along the way they spread hell (at the factory the stench and heat are worse), heaven (where they wanted to feed them with pieces of cloud), and they take away lightning from G-d. They come back to earth. Then it ended. They repair a locomotive and a steamship, extract oil and coal. And then the promised land opens up, full of talking instruments (they want to be used), gov. products (to be eaten). And no bourgeoisie, because... it was built by the proletarians themselves...By the way, the pure ones are quite specific. People. Englishman, for example. – Lloyd George.

"Bug". Enchanting comedy. 1928. According to Mayak himself. - “the theme of the fight against philistinism” (see brief content) Delivered by Vs. Meyerhold in 1929. The play is mostly prosaic. The poems are like “propaganda”, which the Locksmith uses and the cries of the peddlers. The language is quite lively and easy to read. The most interesting thing is that it is funny at times. The deep message is not visible (. The main character, Prisypkin (Pierre Skripkin), character: “it’s not the tie that’s tied to him, but he’s tied to the tie,” “the sideburns weigh like a dog’s tail.” He changed his last name because of the euphony, "I lost one private party card, but gained a lot of government loan tickets." He speaks in buzzwords, is extremely tongue-tied, and obsequious. Because of him, at the very beginning, the good girl Zoya Berezkina shoots herself. Prisypkin plays romances and in general is a collective . a model of an everyman. Former hostel comrades laugh at him, and after a suicide attempt, Zoya is kicked out onto the street. However, Pr. does not lose heart, he gets married. The wedding planner, a certain Oleg Bayan (formerly Bochkin), is very interesting. He is an exaggerated Skripkin . He is a real guru of the bourgeoisie. Teaches Skr. to dance, discreetly scratch his back while dancing, constantly jokes. Skr.’s mother-in-law is also an interesting character. Rosalia Pavlovna, apparently, sorry, a Jew. She bargains for a herring at the very beginning (from the episode “2.60 for this sturgeon!" - "how? 2.60 for this overgrown sprat"). Her daughter, bride Skr. seems to be the same thing. The guests at the wedding are “red”, i.e., red-faced. In general, at the wedding we got drunk, got into fights and burned out. But Prisypkin did not burn: it was winter and he froze in a basement flooded with water. 50 years later, in 1979, it was unfrozen. See brief. sod. All people vote electronically. There is a horn and electric in the hall. hands (. They are all busy there - a complete utopia. Tangerines grow on the trees on saucers. Only now, in this society, the “bacteria of sycophancy”, defrosted along with the Pr., began to spread. The dogs began to suck up and serve, the workers began to drink. Director At this time, the zoo heroically catches a bug that had escaped from the collar of Pr. The bug was caught. Pr. himself volunteered to feed it with his blood. Visitors to the zoo in front of the cage with Pr. and the bug are given: alcohol, cigarettes (to feed the “philistines vulgaris”), headphones (ears shut up) and carbolic acid (“for the sake of spitting”). Bedbug = Prisypkin. Because a bug drinks the blood of 1 meal, and the average person drinks the blood of all humanity. This is such a morality, fresh and original. Kr. content Valid plays in Tambov: the first three paintings - in 1929, the remaining six paintings - in 1979. Former. worker, former party member Ivan Prisypkin, renamed. himself for the sake of euphony in Pierre Skripkin, is going to marry Elzevira Davidovna Renaissance - a hairdresser's daughter, a hairdresser's cashier and a manicurist. With his future mother-in-law Rosalia Pavlovna, who “needs a professional card in the house,” Pierre Skripkin walks around the square in front of a huge department store, buying from hawkers everything he thinks is necessary. for future family life: a toy “dancing people from ballet studios”, a bra that he mistook for a cap for a possible future twins, etc. Oleg Bayan (formerly Bochkin) for 15 rubles and bottles. vodka undertakes to organize a real red labor wedding for Prisypkin - class, elevated, elegant and intoxicating. celebration Their conversation about the future wedding is heard by Zoya Berezkina, a worker and former lover. Prisypkina. In response to confusion. Zoya's questions Prisypkin explains that he loves someone else. Zoya is crying. Youth residents. slave. dormitories discussion Prisypkin’s marriage to the hairdresser’s daughter and his change of surname. Many people condemn him, but some understand him - this is not 1919, people want to live for themselves. Bayan teaches Prisypkin good manners: how to dance the foxtrot (“don’t move your lower bust”), how to scratch yourself unnoticed while dancing, and also gives him other useful advice: don’t wear two ties at the same time, don’t wear starch untucked. shirt, etc. Suddenly the sound of a shot is heard - it’s Zoya Berezkina who shot herself. At the wedding of Pierre Skripkin and Elzevira Renaissance, Oleg Bayan officiates. speech, then plays the piano, everyone sings and drinks. The best man, defending the dignity of the newlywed, starts quarrel after quarrel, a fight breaks out, the stove overturns, and a fire breaks out. Arriving firefighters are missing one person, the rest all die in the fire. 50 years later, at a depth of 7 meters, a team digging a trench for the foundation discovers a backfill. frozen ground human figure. Human Institute resurrection reports that calluses were found on the individual’s hands, which in the past were a sign of hard work. A vote is held among all regions of the federation of the earth, a decision is made by a majority of votes: in the name of researching the labor skills of a working person, an individual can be resurrected. This individual turned out to be Prisypkin. The entire world press reports with delight about his upcoming resurrection. The news is reported to the correspondent. “Chukotskie Izvestia”, “Warsaw Koms. Pravda", "Izvestia of the Chicago Council", "Roman Red Newspaper", "Shanghai Poor" and other newspapers. The defrosting is carried out by a professor, assisted by Zoya Berezkina, whose suicide attempt 50 years ago failed. Prisypkin wakes up and a bug, defrosted with him, crawls from his collar onto the wall. Having discovered that he was caught in 1979, Prisypkin faints. Reporter story listeners that in order to ease the transition period for Prisypkin, doctors ordered him to drink beer (“a mixture that is poisonous in large doses and disgusting in small doses”), and now 520 medical workers. laboratories who drank this potion are in hospitals. Among those who have listened to enough of Prisypkin’s romances, performed by him with a guitar, an epidemic of “falling in love” has spread: they dance, mutter poetry, sigh, and so on. At this time, a crowd led by the director of the zoological department. garden catches a runaway bug - extremely rare. a specimen of an insect that was extinct and most popular at the beginning of the century. Under the supervision of a doctor in a clean room on a clean bed lies the dirtiest Prisypkin. He asks for a hangover and demands to “freeze him back.” Zoya Berezkina brings several books at his request, but he does not find anything “for the soul”: books are now only scientific and documentary. In the middle of zoological garden on a pedestal draped cage, surrounded by. musicians and a crowd of spectators. Foreigners are arriving. correspondents, ancient old men and women, a column of children approaches singing. The director of the zoo in his speech gently reproaches the professor who defrosted Prisypkin for the fact that, guided by external signs, he mistakenly classified him as “homo sapiens” and his highest species - the worker class. In fact, defrost. mammal - a humanoid malingerer with an almost human appearance. appearance, responding to an announcement given by the director of the zoo: “Based on the principles of the zoo, I am looking for a living human body for constant nibbling and for the maintenance and development of a freshly acquired one. insect in its usual, normal conditions.” Now they are placed in one cage - “clopus normalis” and “philistines vulgaris”. Prisypkin hums in a cage. The director, putting on gloves and armed with pistols, takes Prisypkin to the podium. He suddenly sees spectators sitting in the hall and shouts: “Citizens! Brothers! Their! Native! When did you all get unfrozen? Why am I alone in a cage? Why am I suffering? Prisypkin is taken away, the cage is closed.

Bulgakov "Zoyka's apartment".(1926). In current I spent 2 years at the theater named after. Vakhtangov, then removed from the repertoire. Print. here only in 1982. The play is satirical. depicts the morals of the Nepman bottom and its representatives: the swindler and sharper Ametistov, the owner of a sewing workshop, but in fact a dating house, Zoya Peltz, the former Count Obolyaninov and others. play conn. features of comedy of manners and melodrama + elements of slapstick and farce. Comic techniques: 1) Tricks. How Zoya bribes Hallelujah: she gives him 50 rubles, says that the banknote is counterfeit, and asks him to throw it away. 2) Character. particular pronunciation. The sign “Vhotvsankhaipratsesnuyu” above Gazolin’s establishment, the Russian speech of Gazolin and Cherub (Chinese) and imitation of Chinese. speeches: “La yes but, la yes but.” 3) Use of stationery and new speeches. turns: “She will scratch you all over the official,” “Today a former chicken is on display,” “Humane pants!”, “Her eyes are uncreditable.” 4) Pun: “Apparently, he is omnipotent, this former Goose. Now he’s probably an eagle”, “Why are you standing like a Chinese wall?”, “So would you like to hang a naked woman on a bare wall?” 5) Speech. characteristics of the characters. Obolyaninov very good. loves the word “former”, Amethyst repeats all the time: “There’s a whole novel here!” 6) Sarcastic. remarks: “Mannequins that look like ladies, ladies that look like mannequins.” 7) Aphoristic. saying: “A person receiving. two hundred chervonets a month cannot be vulgar.” The play continued. satirical prosaic line production B., some. elements of it are a direct reference. us to B.’s prose (however, such author’s intertextual connections are characteristic of B.’s prose), in particular, to “The Heart of a Dog” (the intrigue around the seal, a former hen that a certain professor turned into a rooster, here we can also recall "Fatal Eggs")

Kr. content. The action takes place in the 1920s. in Moscow. May evening. Zoya Denisovna Peltz, a thirty-five-year-old widow, dresses in front of the mirror. The chairman of the house committee, Hallelujah, comes to her on business. He warns Zoya that they have decided to seal her up - she has six rooms. After long conversations, Zoya shows Alleluya permission to open a sewing workshop and school. Additional area - sixteen fathoms. Zoya gives Halleluja a bribe, and he says that perhaps he will take over the rest of the rooms, after which he leaves. Enter Pavel Fedorovich Obolyaninov, Zoya's lover. He feels unwell, and Zoya sends the maid Manyushka to get morphine from the Chinese, who often sells it to Obolyaninov. The Chinese Gazolin and his assistant Cherub sell drugs. Manyushka tells Gazolin, a well-known swindler, to go with her and dilute morphine in the required proportion in front of Zoya - he makes it liquid himself. Gazolin sends with her his assistant, the handsome Chinese Cherubim. Zoya gives Obolyaninov an injection, and he comes to life. Cherub announces a price higher than Gazolin’s price, but Pavel also gives him a tip and agrees with the “honest” Chinese that he will bring morphine daily. Zoya, in turn, hires him to iron in the workshop. The delighted Cherub leaves. Zoya tells Pavel about her plans, Manyushka, already privy to all of Zoya’s affairs, leaves to get beer and forgets to close the door, into which Amethyst, Zoya’s cousin, a sharper and swindler, immediately penetrates. He overhears Zoya and Pavel talking about a “workshop” that needs an administrator, and instantly guesses what’s going on. Manyushka comes running and calls Zoya. She turns to stone at the sight of her cousin. Pavel leaves them alone, and Zoya is surprised that she herself read how he was shot in Baku, to which Amethyst assures her that this is a mistake. Zoya clearly does not want to host him, but her cousin, who has nowhere to live, blackmails her with an overheard conversation. Zoya, deciding that this is fate, gives him a position as an administrator in her business, registers him with her and introduces him to Pavel. He immediately understands what an outstanding person is in front of him and how he will handle the matter.

Autumn. Zoya's apartment has been turned into a workshop, a portrait of Marx is on the wall. A seamstress sews on a machine, three ladies try on sewn clothes, and a cutter is busy. When everyone leaves, only Amethyst and Zoya remain. They talk about a certain beauty Alla Vadimovna, who is needed for the night's enterprise. Alla owes Zoya about 500 rubles, she needs money, and Amethyst is convinced that she will agree. Zoya doubts. Amethyst insists, but then Manyushka comes in and announces Alla’s arrival. Amethyst disappears after several compliments made to Alla. Alla, left alone with Zoya, says that she is very ashamed of not paying her debt and that she is very bad with money. Zoya sympathizes with her and offers her a job. Zoya promises to pay Alla 60 chervonets a month, cancel the debt and get a visa if Alla works for Zoya as a fashion model in the evenings for just four months, and Zoya guarantees that no one will know about this. Alla agrees to start working in three days, since she needs money to go to Paris - she has a fiance there. As a sign of friendship, Zoya gives her a Parisian dress, after which Alla leaves. Zoya leaves to change clothes, and Amethyst and Manyushka prepare for the arrival of Goose, the wealthy commercial director of the refractory metals trust, to whom the “atelier” owes its existence. Amethyst removes the portrait of Marx and hangs a painting of a nude. Under the hands of Manyushka and Amethyst, the room is transformed. Pavel arrives, who plays the piano in the evenings (and is burdened by it), and goes into Zoya’s room. Then - Cherub, who brought cocaine for Amethyst, and while he snorts, changes into a Chinese outfit. The ladies of the night "studio" appear one by one. Finally, Goose appears and is greeted by the luxuriously dressed Zoya. Gus asks Zoya to show him Parisian models, as he needs a gift for the woman he loves. Zoya introduces him to Amethyst, who, after greetings, calls Cherubim and orders champagne. Models are demonstrated to music. The goose is delighted with how the matter is handled.

Three days later, Hallelujah comes and says that people come to their apartment at night and play music, but Amethyst gives him a bribe, and he leaves. After the call from Goose, who announces his imminent arrival, a satisfied Amethyst calls Pavel to the pub. After they leave, Cherub and Manyushka are left alone. Cherub invites Manyushka to go to Shanghai, promising to get a lot of money, she refuses, teases him (she likes Cherub) and says that maybe she will marry someone else; the Chinese tries to stab her, and then, after releasing her, announces that he has proposed. He runs into the kitchen, and then Gazolin comes to propose to Manyushka. Cherub comes running from the kitchen, the Chinese are quarreling. Escaping, Gazolin rushes into the closet. The doorbell rings. Cherub runs away. This was a commission from the People's Commissariat for Education. They examine everything, find a picture of a naked woman and Gazolin in the closet, who says that in this apartment at night they smoke opium and dance, and complains that the Cherub is killing him. The commission releases Gazolin and leaves, assuring Manyushka that everything is fine.

Night. All the guests are having a lot of fun, and in the next room Goose is sad and talking to himself alone. Zoya appears. Goose tells her that he understands what trash his mistress is. Zoya calms him down. The goose finds consolation in the fact that he calls everyone and distributes money. The model show begins. Allah comes out. The goose is horrified to see... his mistress! A scandal begins. Goose announces to everyone that his bride, with whom he lives, for whom he leaves his family, works in a brothel. Zoya takes all the guests into the hall, leaving them alone. Alla explains to Goose that she doesn’t love him and wants to go abroad. The goose calls her a liar and a prostitute. Alla runs away. The goose is in despair - he loves Alla. A Cherub appears, calms Goose and suddenly hits him under the shoulder blade with a knife. The goose is dying. The Chinese sits Goose in a chair, gives him the phone, calls Manyushka and takes the money. Manyushka is terrified, but Cherub threatens her, and they run away together. Amethyst comes, discovers the corpse, understands everything and hides, breaking into Zoya’s box of money. Zoya comes in, sees the corpse, calls Pavel and goes to get the money in order to escape quickly, but the box has been broken into. She grabs Pavel’s hand and runs to the door, but their path is blocked by a commission from the People’s Commissariat for Education and Gazolin. Zoya explains that Goose was killed by the Chinese and Amethyst. Drunken guests spill out of the hall. Hallelujah enters; Having seen the commission, he says in horror that he has known everything about this dark apartment for a long time, and Zoya shouts that he has ten in his pocket, which she gave him as a bribe, she knows the number. Everyone is taken away. Zoya says sadly: “Goodbye, goodbye, my apartment!”

Bulgakov is also involved in stage productions. adaptations: “Days of the Turbins” - arrangement of “The White Guard”, “War and Peace” (I think); creates the original. a play about Molière “The Cabal of the Saint.”

Marina Tsvetaeva.

Ts. speaks of high. roles and purpose poet, but at the same time she is inclined to equate her work with a cross. with labor: “In sweat - the one who writes, in the sweat - the one who plows!” Looking for my path in art, in the post-revolution. time comes to romantic theater. Ts. met a group of actors from the 3rd studio of the Moscow Art Theater, under the direction of. Vakhtangov. 1m of them turned out. beginner poet and director Pavel Antokolsky, with whom Ts. is connected. close friendship. Antokolsky introduces Ts. to the actor (later outstanding director) Yuri Zavadsky, to whom Ts. became interested and dedicated. cycle "Comedian". Antokolsky and Zavadsky introduced her to the Studio. During this period, the dramaturgy of Central Asia and its romanticism were born. theater. Cycle of plays, combined. subsequently under the general called “Romance”, incl. next things: “Blizzard”, “Fortune”, “Stone Angel”, “Adventure”, “Knave of Hearts”, “Phoenix”, “The End of Casanova”. None of the plays were staged. Ts., based on drama. Blok (“Rose and Cross”), Annensky’s lyrics are created in a rather abstract way. and conditional theater, takes the reader into the past (XVI-XVII centuries), action. The faces become playful. cards, Angel, Cupid, Venus, Mother of God, etc. but this is not symbolic, but romantic. theater: mysterious. the circumstances in which it operates. will exclude. heroes, romantic color, fury of passions, poetics of contrasts, closeness of lyres. poetry, weakened plot. The plays were dedicated. studio actress Sophia Golliday.

Drama of the 30s. (Arbuzov and others)

Historical the situation in the 30s: industrialization, collectivism, five-year plans... All personal interests must be sacrificed on the altar of the common cause - to build socialism in a short time, otherwise we will all be strangled and killed.

In dramaturgy, there is a dispute between supporters of “new forms” and supporters of “old forms” (which in the heat of the moment were often declared “bourgeois”). The main question was this: is it possible to convey new content using dram. forms of the past, or necessary. urgently break the tradition and create. something new. Supporters of the “new forms” were Vs. Vishnevsky and N. Pogodin, their opponents were Afinogenov, Kirshon and others. the first opposed the drama of personal destinies. against psychologism, for the portrayal of the masses. For the second group of playwrights, the need to search for new forms was also clear, but the path to their search should not go through the destruction of the old, but through renewal. they are a ledge. for mastering the art of psychologism. showing the life of a new society by creating types of new people in their individuality. appearance

The works of playwrights of the 1st group are characterized by scale, versatility, and epicness. scope, destruction of the stage. boxes,” attempts to transfer the action to the “wide open spaces of life.” Hence the desire for dynamism, refusal to divide into acts, splitting the action into laconic episodes and, as a result, a certain cinematography. Examples: Vs. Vishnevsky “Optimistic.” tragedy" (see No. 4), N. Pogodin "Temp".

It is typical for the production of playwrights of the 2nd group to appeal not to the masses, but to the individual. history, psychological developer character of a hero, given not only in society... but also in person. life, gravitate towards a laconic, not scattered composition, tradition. organizational actions and plot organization. Examples: Afinogenov “Fear”, Kirshon “Bread”.

From 2nd floors. 30s – a turn to new topics, characters, conflicts. The simple Soviet man, living, has come to the fore. Next door. The conflict is transferred from the sphere of struggle against class hostile forces and their re-education; it is transferred to the moral sphere. and ideological collisions: the fight against the remnants of capitalism, against the philistinism, the gray inhabitants. Examples: Afinogenov “Distant”, Leonov “Ordinary Man”.

During the same period, widespread development was achieved. plays, dedicated personal life, family, love, everyday life, and => deepening the psychologism of owls. dramaturgy. Here we can talk about lyrically colored psychologism. Examples: Arbuzov “Tanya”, Afinogenov “Mashenka”. Arbuzov "Tanya". The play “Tanya” by Alexei Arbuzov was written in two editions: in 1938 and rewritten in 1947, when the bright romanticism of great construction projects subsided somewhat. A gentle, spoiled girl from Arbat fell in love with the construction geologist German, left medical school for him, got married, sat at home working on her husband’s drawings, forgot about herself - her husband turned his nose up: they say, you don’t have your own dreams. I fell in love with the heroine gold miner Shamanova from the Pravdin editorial, but I couldn’t hide it. The gentle girl discovered reserves of resilience in herself, left home in one dress, with a child under her heart, without telling anyone anything. The child died of diphtheria because student Tanya did not take notes on the corresponding lecture and was looking at the lecturer’s mustache. After running around idle in Moscow, she shows the heroic essence required by the time and leaves for the Far East to build the fabulous city of Stalgrad. There, at the end of the world, Tanya overcomes forty kilometers on skis in a snowstorm and her fear of the dark and cures the sick child of German and Shamanova, whom the playwright sent to the same places. As the heroine admits, when everything is already behind her and the child, in whom she sees her deceased Yurik, is completely healthy, she was able to walk through the dark forest after hearing a message on the radio: a ceremonial parade was taking place on Red Square in Moscow at that time. Even in Soviet times, Arbuzov’s plays managed to talk about ordinary people and love as the main criterion of happiness, and the historical context in the form of the great construction projects of communism still remained in them as a background and used as a dramatic mechanism as needed. Afinogenov "Mashenka". Playwright depicted This is the first feeling of a 15 year old girl.

The first attempt to portray Lenin on stage dates back to this period. IN 1937 – 3 plays about Lenin Pogodin, of which the most. bright – "Man with a Gun"(+ “Kremlin chimes”, “Third pathetic”). Because Pogodin is a follower of the “new form”; Lenin is on display here. against the background of revolution. events, so to speak. in unity with the masses.

Another trend is related to the rampant fascism in Europe => We all must be ready not only for work, but also for defense. Arose. so-called defense literature and, accordingly, dramaturgy. Examples: Simonov “A guy from our city”, Afinogenov “Salute, Spain!” (romantic drama). Also appeared historical. plays, resurrecting in the people's consciousness images of legends. regiments of the past: Bakhterev, Razumovsky “Commander Suvorov”, someone else wrote “Field Marshal Kutuzov”. Scripts can probably be classified to some extent as dramaturgy, then we also add the script for the film “Alexander Nevsky” by Pyotr Pavlenko.

All this develops gradually until such a person appears - Alexander Vampilov.

Characteristics of Vampilov's dramaturgy.

Biography. Alexander Vampilov was born on August 19, 1937 in the regional center of Kutulik, Irkutsk region, into an ordinary family. His father, Valentin Nikitovich, worked as the director of the Kutulik school (his ancestors were Buryat lamas), his mother, Anastasia Prokopyevna, worked there as a head teacher and mathematics teacher (her ancestors were Orthodox priests). Before Alexander was born, the family already had three children - Volodya, Misha and Galya. After several months after his birth, one of the school teachers wrote a denunciation to the NKVD against V.’s father. His arrest. and rank. to the “pan-Mongolists” - supporters of reunification. Buryatia, Mongolia and 2 nationalities. districts. Court of Prigov. him to be shot. After finishing school, V. entered history and philology. Faculty of Irkutsk University. Already in his first year, he began to try his hand at writing, composing short comic books. stories. In 1958, some of them appeared on the pages of local periodicals. A year later, V. was added to the staff of the Irkutsk region. newspapers "Sov. youth" and in Tvorch. Association of Young People (TOM) under the auspices of the newspaper and the Writers' Union. In 1961 The first (and only during his lifetime) book of Yum was published. stories by V. It was called “Coincidence of Circumstances.” True, on the cover it was not his real name, but his pseudonym - A. Sanin. In 1962 editors of "Sov. youth" decides to send his talent. employee V. to Moscow for Higher Lit. courses Center. Komsomol schools. Having studied there for several years. months, V. returned to his homeland, he was assigned responsibility. newspaper secretary. In December of the same year, a creative event took place in Maleevka. a seminar at which V. presented to the readers two of his one-act comedies: “Crow’s Grove” and “One Hundred Rubles in New Money.” In 1964 Vampilov leaves the newspaper and devotes himself entirely. I'm pissing myself. Soon 2 collections will be released in Irkutsk. collection with his stories. A year after this, V. again goes to Moscow in the hope of finding a job in one of the capital's cities. theaters their new play “Farewell in June”. However, these attempts then ended in vain. In December he enters Higher. lit. Lita courses. Winter 1965 something unexpected happened. acquaintance with drama Alexey Arbuzov. The play “Farewell in June,” which V. presented to Arbuzov, had an effect on the venerable dramatist. good impression. Therefore, when V. called him several times later. days home, he invited him to his place. Their meeting lasted several times. hours and made a stunning impression on V. True, he never managed to break this play into the capital: he staged it first on his stage in 1966. Klaipeda Drama Theatre. On this occasion, in December of that year, V. gave an interview to the newspaper “Sov. Klaipeda", which turned out to be (by an evil irony of fate) unity. talented in life playwright. In the same year, V. joined the Writers' Union. Lived in a lita dormitory. He devoted all his free time to two activities: writing or drinking with classmates on the dorm roof. One of his drinking buddies was Nikolai Rubtsov

Vampilov wrote his first play in 1962. It was "Twenty Minutes with an Angel." Then “Farewell in June” appeared (it was A. Arbuzov who read it), “The Incident of the Master Page,” “The Eldest Son,” “Duck Hunt” (both 1970), “Last Summer in Chulimsk” (1972) and others. They evoked the warmest responses from those who read them, but not a single theater in Moscow or Leningrad agreed to stage them. Only the provinces welcomed the playwright: by 1970. His play “Farewell in June” was shown in eight theaters at once. But the Irkutsk Youth Theater, which now bears his name, never staged any of his plays during V.’s lifetime. By 1972 relative capital theater. society towards V.'s plays began to change. I took “Last Summer in Chulimsk” for stanza. Theater named after Ermolova, “Farewell” - Theater named after. Stanislavsky. In March, the premiere of “Provincial Anecdotes” takes place at the Leningrad Bolshoi Drama Theater. Even cinema pays attention to V.: Lenfilm signs an agreement with him for the script for Pine Springs. It seemed that luck had finally smiled on the talented playwright. He is young, full of creative energy and plans. His personal life with his wife Olga is also going well. And suddenly - an absurd death.

On August 17, 1972, two days before his 35th birthday, Vampilov, together with his friends - Gleb Pakulov and Vladimir Zhemchuzhnikov - went on vacation to Lake Baikal, the boat capsized, he even swam to the shore, and on the shore his heart broke. Then - posthumous glory. His books began to be published (only 1 was published during his lifetime), theaters staged his plays (“The Eldest Son” was shown in 44 theaters across the country), and studio directors began filming films based on his works. His museum was opened in Kutulik, and a Youth Theater was named after A. Vampilov in Irkutsk. A memorial stone appeared at the site of the death.

“Provincial. jokes." 2 parts: “The Incident of the Met Page” and “Twenty Minutes with an Angel” (1962). Valid persons: 1) Kaloshin - administrator of the Taiga Hotel. Potapov is a business traveler, a page manager by profession. Rukosuev is a doctor, a friend of Kaloshin. Kamaev is a young man, a physical education teacher. Marina is Kaloshin's wife, a waitress at the Taiga restaurant. Victoria is a girl getting a job. Epigraph from Gogol: “No matter what you say, such incidents happen in the world—rarely, but they do happen.” 2) Khomutov - agronomist. Anchugin is a driver. Ugarov - forwarder (seconded from the city of Lopatsk). Bazilsky is a violinist who arrived on tour. Stupak is an engineer. Faina is a student (newlyweds). Vasyuta - corridor of the Taiga Hotel.

"Eldest Son" (1970). Valid persons: Busygin; Silvia; Sarafanov; Vasenka; Kudimov; Nina; Makarska; 2 girlfriends; neighbour.

"Duck Hunt" (1970). Valid persons: Zilov; Kuzakov; Sayapin; Sash; Galina; Irina; Faith; Valeria; waiter; boy.

Character peculiarities. We remember that the owls Drama in the 30s developed in 2 directions: pathetic-patriotic and psychological. Dramat. Vampilov is the development of the 2nd direction. Chamber pieces, small. number of characters, the action is compact in time and space (several hours, a day, a number of short episodes spaced in time; a hotel room; a house and a street nearby; an apartment, an office, the Forget-Me-Not cafe). The role of the detail is important: a few words - and an important feature of the portrait is ready (Ugarov asks for money not from his wife, but from his mother; Nina tells Busygin not to come, but then asks when he will come; Zilov’s gun, which does not shoot). In general, this gun is like a symbol. In V., the development of action is a string of twists and turns in which the hero becomes entangled. And the ending is completely unexpected. You expect Zilov to shoot himself, but he doesn’t shoot himself. It was Chekhov who could shoot himself, but V.’s hero cannot pull the trigger.

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Let us consider the main trends in the development of domestic drama in the 1950-1990s.

1950-1960s

In the 1950s and 1960s, the genre range of dramaturgy significantly diversified. Comedy, socio-psychological and historical-documentary dramas are being developed. To a greater extent than in prose and poetry, interest in the young contemporary, in real life in its most acute contradictions, intensifies.
Social and psychological plays by V. Rozov, such as “Good Hour!” were especially popular. (1954) and In Search of Joy (1956). “Good morning!” and is currently being staged on the theater stage.

Increasingly, dramaturgy drew attention to the everyday problems of ordinary people. Exploring the psychology of human relationships, playwrights place characters in recognizable life circumstances. The dramas of A. Volodin and E. Radzinsky are dedicated to love.

Turning to the theme of war, playwrights of the 1950s and 1960s moved away from journalism; they viewed problems such as duty and conscience, heroism and betrayal, honor and dishonor through the prism of moral values. One of the best plays in the repertoire of those years was A. Salynsky’s play “The Drummer” (1958).

Drama of the Thaw period

During the "thaw" period, theatrical art developed in close cooperation with poetry. On the stage of the Taganka Drama and Comedy Theater, poetic performances were performed, the dramatic basis of which was the poems of the classics V. Mayakovsky and S. Yesenin, and the works of contemporaries - A. Voznesensky and E. Yevtushenko. The theater under the direction of Yu. Lyubimov gravitated towards expressive forms of imagery, and thanks to the “Iron Curtain” that was slightly opened at that time, the country’s artistic culture partly came into contact with Western European and American art. In particular, Y. Lyubimov’s direction was influenced by the creativity and theoretical concepts of B. Brecht.

The work of M. Shatrov, who showed the image of Lenin from an unusual perspective, is associated with the “thaw”. In Shatrov’s documentary-historical, political dramaturgy, a documentary fact is subject to analytical research, and not a myth about the leader created by political ideologists. His most successful play of the Thaw period is “The Sixth of July” (first edition - 1964, second - 1973). In it, the playwright explores the problem of the relationship between a goal, even a high one, and the means to achieve it. M. Shatrov turned to the image of Lenin in subsequent decades. He himself defined the genre uniqueness of his plays as “publicistic drama” and “publicistic tragedy.” There is every reason for this: open journalisticism is inherent in such highly controversial plays by M. Shatrov of the 1970s and 1980s as “Blue Horses on Red Grass” (1977) and “So Let’s Whiten It!” (1981).

Dramaturgy in the late 1960s - 1980s.

The end of the “thaw” required other heroes and an adequate assessment of reality and the moral state of society, which was far from the supposed ideal. At the end of the 1960s, there was a decline in the development of drama. Obviously, this was the reason for the active appeal of theaters in the 1970s to the works of domestic prose writers F. Abramov, V. Tendryakov, Yu. Bondarev, V. Bykov, B. Vasiliev, D. Granin, V. Rasputin, Yu. Trifonov, B Mozhaeva, V. Shukshina, Ch. Aitmatova.

In the same 1970s, research into the most pressing problems of socio-economic. moral and psychological nature was dealt with by journalistically focused production. or sociological, drama by I. Dvoretsky, G. Bokarev, A. Grebnev, V. Chernykh, etc. The “production” plays of A. Gelman were especially popular.

Over time, the tone of social, everyday and socio-psychological drama also changed. V. Rozov, A. Volodin, A. Arbuzov. A. Vampilov and other authors tried to understand the causes of the moral crisis of society, the changes that occur in the inner world of a person living according to the laws of double morality of “stagnant time”.

The turning point in V. Rozov’s dramaturgy was reflected in the play “Traditional Gathering” (1966), dedicated to the theme of summing up life’s results, which contrast with the romantic aspirations of the heroes of his dramas of the 1950s. In the plays of the 1970s and 1980s, “The Wood Grouse's Nest” (1978), “The Master” (1982), “The Boar” (1987) and others, Rozov turned to the theme of the gradual destruction of an initially promising personality. Universal human values ​​became the subject of reflection in the plays of L. Volodin and E. Radzinsky. Both authors used parable forms for the purpose of philosophical comprehension of timeless situations, problems, and characters.

A. Arbuzov’s plays of the 1970s and 1980s are devoted to the problem of internal degradation of an outwardly successful personality. The pathos of denial of “cruel games” in which both adults and children are involved, deprived of parental love at one time, is marked by his dramas dedicated to the topic of mutual responsibility of people for what happens to them. The playwright created the "Dramatic Opus" cycle, which includes three dramas - "Evening Light" (1974), "Cruel Intentions" (1978) and "Memoirs" (1980).

The mental and spiritual infantilism of a contemporary is the key theme of A. Vampilov’s dramaturgy, which appeared on the theater stage in the 1970s. In the words of the critic L. Anninsky, the playwright created a type of “average moral” hero, whose character is so dependent on the proposed circumstances that it is impossible to understand what he really is. This is the hero of Vampilov’s play “Duck Hunt” (1970), Viktor Zilov. The name of A. Vampilov is associated with the strengthening of the role of symbolism and the grotesque in Russian drama.

Drama of the 1980s - 1990s

The discovery of the “heroless” hero A. Vampilov is perceived as a milestone in the development of Russian drama in the second half of the 20th century. The work of the “new wave” authors who came to drama at the turn of the 1980s and adopted Vampilov’s experience was called “post-Vampilov drama.”
This concept of dramaturgy unites the work of playwrights L. Petrushevskaya, V. Arro, V. Slavkin,

A. Galin, L. Razumovskaya and others, differing in style, but united by the pathos of addressing the negativity that has accumulated in the everyday, private life of people who have lost from the value field the concept of home, the image of which has long been key in Russian literature. Thus, the “post-vampire theater” loudly declared that the human personality is not reducible to just one socio-professional function. And a contemptuous attitude towards personal everyday and family problems is ultimately fraught with serious moral vices.

During the years of perestroika, at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, artistic journalism of “sociological” drama gave way to journalism proper, and dramatic works themselves were replaced by dramatizations of memoir literature. In productions of works by V. Shalamov, E. Ginzburg, A. Solzhenitsyn, the theme of totalitarianism was explored in a psychological key. Using the same material in the late 1980s, A. Kazantsev wrote the dramatic dystopia “Great Buddha, help them!” (1988), the action of which takes place in the "exemplary Commune of Great Ideas." The playwright examines the theme of a totalitarian regime in terms of the problem of the individual and the state.

In Russian dramaturgy of the second half of the 20th century, the postmodernist feeling did not manifest itself as early as in other literary genres. This is not least due to the fact that theater as a public phenomenon was primarily under the close attention of censorship.

The most clearly postmodern way of understanding reality was manifested in Wen's unfinished play. Erofeev "Walpurgis Night, or Commander's Steps!" (1985). The content of the play is based on a comparison of life with a madhouse: the reasonable in this life turns out to be abnormal, and the abnormal turns out to be reasonable. Thus, in the postmodern drama “Walpurgis Night...” there is no pronounced conflict, the plot is fragmented, the system of characters is devoid of hierarchy, and gender and genre boundaries are blurred.

The postmodernist dramas of the last decade of the 20th century by N. Sadur, D. Lipskerova and others are associated with the traditions of the theater of the absurd. The ideas of postmodern consciousness about the world and man are expressed in modern drama by such means as the absence of cause-and-effect relationships, interdependence of characters and circumstances, plotlessness, spatial -temporal deformations, isolation and alienation of characters.

On the other hand, in the 1990s, an opposite trend emerged in the development of domestic drama. In the plays of M. Ugarov, E. Gremina, O. Mikhailov and others, a nostalgically bright pathos for the distant, idyllically beautiful past dominates. Playwrights create a poetically sublime image of the lives of characters whose speech is literary standardized and replete with quotes from Chekhov's comedies. This creates the effect of different eras reflecting each other, which has at least a double meaning. Either the playwrights want to point out that the desired harmony is achievable only in artistic reality, or they remind us of the “sound of a breaking string,” which, in the words of Chekhov’s Firs, foreshadows “misfortune” from “will.”

Book materials used: Literature: textbook. for students avg. prof. textbook institutions / ed. G.A. Obernikhina. M.: "Academy", 2010

XIV
WESTERN DRAMATURGY OF THE XX CENTURY

General characteristics. — Theater of German Expressionism. The “I-drama” phenomenon. Kaiser's play "Coral". — Drama by Pirandello. “Six characters in search of an author”: new relationships between the stage and the hall. — Garcia Lorca: poetic theater. The tragedy "Bloody Wedding": the interaction of the language of literature and theater. — Brecht’s “Epic Theater”: a dispute with the Aristotelian doctrine of catharsis; awakening the viewer's socially critical activity. “Mother Courage and her children”: the genre of historical chronicle. “The Life of Galileo”: the image of a scientist. Wilder's search: one of the options for “non-Aristotelian” dramaturgy. — O'Neill: “Long Day's Journey into Night” (a tragedy based on autobiographical material). — Existentialist dramaturgy. “Theater of Situations.” “Flies” by Sartre: interpretation of an ancient plot. — “Theater of the Absurd”: tragedy and farce in Beckett and Ionesco "Waiting for Todo": dramatization of "nothing" "Angry Young Men" - "Don Juan, or the Love of Geometry" by Frisch and "Rosenkranz and Tildenstern are Dead" by Stoppard: variations on traditional themes - Schaeffer's dramaturgy "King's Hunt" beyond the sun": a synthesis of "epic theater" and "theater of cruelty" by Artaud. - Bernhard's dramaturgy. "The Force of Habit": the "order" of art and the chaos of the world. "Ithaca" by Strauss and "Arcadia" by Stoppard: two understandings of modernity.

The evolution of Western theater went in two main directions in the 20th century. Firstly, this is the transformation of the theater from the inside, associated either with the presentation of new themes and motives, or with the rethinking of tradition. Secondly, these are fundamental changes in the sphere of interaction between the stage and the viewer, the idea of ​​​​using theater to activate the viewer, be it participation in public life (“epic theater” by B. Brecht) or in ritual (“play of the demon” by F. García Lorca, “ theater of cruelty" by A. Artaud). Let us add that in the 20th century, theatrical art, in the ways of enriching expressiveness, absorbs the possibilities of such seemingly different arts as cinematography and photography.

It is important to note that the theater of the 20th century is primarily a director's theater. Instead of the dictate of the author (or actor), the dictate of the professional director is firmly established in the theater as the main intermediary between the play and the performance, the play and the actor, the play and the audience. The distance between the text and its stage embodiment increases endlessly. Nevertheless, there are many examples of fruitful collaboration between playwrights and theater groups. A rare combination of dramaturgical and directing practice represents the work of Brecht, who created both an influential theory of theatrical art and his own theater (Berliner Ensemble, 1949). The creators of the theaters were also L. Pirandello (Teatro d'Arte, 1925), F. Garcia Lorca (La Baracca, 1931); T. Wilder, J. Anouilh, S. Beckett staged their plays.

The 20th century was marked by a fairly rapid change in various directions in drama and directing. Among the theatrical concepts that have proven to be the most stable over the course of a century, one should name “realism” by K. S. Stanislavsky, “theater of cruelty” by A. Artaud (“Theater of Cruelty. First Manifesto”, 1932; “Second Manifesto”, 1933), “epic theater" by B. Brecht. Being in conflict with each other in the middle of the century, in the 1990s they became material for stylizations and parodies. or, more often, they coexist as heterogeneous elements of one performance.

In the theater of the 20th century, the conventionally metaphorical tradition (the intellectual drama of the existentialists and Brecht, the “theater of the absurd”) coexists with the desire for naturalistic life-likeness (the dramaturgy of the English and German “angry ones”) and the aesthetics of the document (German docudrama of the 1960s). The requirement for a shock effect on the viewer (A. Artaud) is opposed by the rejection of emotions in favor of critical judgment (B. Brecht). Despite the monopoly of the prose element in drama, verse drama does not disappear (T. S. Eliot). Preference is given either to the theatrical performance itself (Dadaist and surrealistic performances), or to the text of the play, in which the monologue word prevails over the stage action (the dramaturgy of the Germans P. Handke and H. Müller, the French J.-P. Wenzel and B.-M. Coltes ).

The most important question that theater at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries (H. Ibsen, M. Maeterlinck) posed to the playwrights of the 20th century was the question of the hidden resources of the prosaic word in drama. By bringing to the stage the burning problems of modern society and the peculiarities of modern consciousness, playwrights of the turn of the century opened up new possibilities for dramatic dialogue. The theater was enriched with “discussion” (H. Ibsen, B. Shaw), “background dialogue” and “silence” (M. Maeterlinck). The tradition of “discussion” is followed by intellectual drama, which includes French drama of the 1930s (J. Giraudoux, J. Anouilh), existentialist drama of the 1940s (J.-P. Sartre, A. Camus), and the drama of Brecht. If Giraudoux's dramaturgy is based on a witty play of thought that compromises common sense in paradoxes and puns, then Brecht is alien to the spirit of French intellectualism. For him, dispute and paradox are by no means a game, but a means to teach the viewer to think.

Maeterlinck’s “Supporting Dialogue”, as well as the famous Chekhovian subtext, were perceived in the 20th century as an opportunity to convey several parallel meanings with one remark, to gradually instill a hidden truth or, conversely, to obscure and hide the truth behind a flow of banal dialogue. Poetic subtext and the charm of lyricism are palpable in the dramas of P. Claudel and F. Garcia Lorca. In expressionist plays (G. Kaiser, early Yu. O'Neil), the confused speeches of the characters sometimes conceal their fears and doubts; in S. Beckett, the paradoxical dialogue hides the emptiness of existence and the horror of it. If in the plays of many absurdists (Beckett, V. Hildesheimer) play on words indicates the impossibility of communication, while in H. Pinter's conversations "around the bush" illustrate not the impossibility, but the fear of speaking directly. In modern drama, the speech of characters, filled with cliches of the media, often allows one to remain silent about what is truly significant.

The desire to reveal the meaning of modernity through metaphor pushed playwrights to use mythological imagery. The possibilities of myth already attracted the surrealists: G. Apollinaire turns to the figure of the soothsayer Tiresias “The Tears of Tiresias”, 1917), J. Cocteau sends the modern Orpheus to Hades to win the new Eurydice from death (“Orpheus”, 1928). The focus on seeing modern reality through the prism of past eras and myth was characteristic of intellectual drama in the 1930s. For both Giraudoux and Anouilh, the extravagance of the dramatic situation in this period is important, allowing one to show the contradictions of modernity: “Amphitryon 38” (1929), “There will be no Trojan War” (1935), “Electra” (1937) by J. Giraudoux, “Eurydice” "(1942) J. Anouya.

During the German occupation, mythology in the plays of French existentialists became a kind of “Aesopian language” (“The Flies” by Sartre, post. 1943; “Antigone” by Anouilh, post. 1943), making it possible to evaluate modernity, moving away from it. Interest in mythological subjects has not waned throughout the 20th century. One should also mention here “Mourning - the Fate of Electra” (1931) by Y. O’Neill, “Orpheus Descends into Hell” (1957) by T. Williams, and among later versions - “Medea-Material” (1981) by H. Muller, “Ithaca” "(1996) B. Strauss.

No less popular are dramas from the lives of historical figures, as well as interpretations of the most important historical events: “The Book of Christopher Columbus” (1927; post. 1953) by P. Claudel, “The Life of Galileo” (1953; post, in an early edition - 1943; post. English version - 1947) B. Brecht, “Becket, or the Honor of God” (1959) J. Anouya, “Luther” (1961) J. Osborne, “A Man for Every Time” (1961) R. Bolt, “Persecution and murder of Marat... (1964; post. 1965) P. Weiss. Brecht proposed a special approach to history: close-ups in his plays are intended for everyday trifles, and skillful editing allows one to avoid depicting “heroic” episodes. The main thing for Brecht is to deprive the viewer of illusions about history, and therefore about modernity.

Directly (bypassing myth and history) modern reality is addressed, although in very different ways, by absurdists and the English “angry” (1950s). Another feature of the dramaturgy of the 20th century is a large number of paraphrases on the themes of the works of the old theater. For example, there are very diverse variations on Shakespearean themes: “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead” (first ed. - 1966; second ed. - 1967) by T. Stoppard, “Hamlet the Machine” (1977; post. 1990) and “Macbeth” (1971; post. 1972) by H. Muller, “McBegg” (1972) by E-Ionesco, “The Merchant” (1977) by A. Wesker.

One of the most striking theatrical movements of the 20th century is German expressionism, which took off in the 1910s and the first half of the 1920s. Expressionists made a name for themselves in drama, directing, acting, scenography, and in the field of musical theater (operas by A. Berg).

The history of expressionist drama can be traced back to 1912, when Reinhard Sorge (1892-1916) published the lyrical-dramatic poem “The Beggar” (Der Bettler, post. 1917). Its main character, the Beggar-Poet, is full of strong passions and impulses. Wanting to assert his creative independence, he becomes the murderer of his own parents (the conflict between fathers and children in expressionism is symbolic) in order to ultimately create a play “for the people” (but at the same time he feels unworthy to devote his life to the masses).

The first expressionist play staged on stage was Walter Hasenclever's drama The Son (Der Sohn, 1914, post. 1916). The clash between fathers and sons, often ending in parricide (A. Bronnen “Parricide”, Vatermord, 1922), the desire for freedom and the denial of conformity - these are the main themes of early expressionist drama. Later, anti-war pathos, as well as social criticism, grew in it, for example, in Ernst Toller (Ernst Toller, 1893-1939).

Conventionally, the dramaturgy of expressionism can be divided into two directions. The first includes plays with socio-philosophical content, in which a person is presented as a representative of a certain class, as a social mask. The second includes dramas on philosophical and mystical themes, in which a lonely, desperate character approaches an abstract Man, a representative not of a people or a class, but of the entire human race. But the most famous expressionist plays combine both layers of content: “Antigone” (Antigone, 1917, post.. 1920) by V. Hasenclever; “The Citizens of Calais” (Die Bürger von Calais, 1914, post. 1917), “From Morning to Midnight” (Von morgens bis mitternachts, 1916, post. 1917), “Coral” (Die Koralle, 1917), “Gas- I" (Gasi, 1918), "Gas-II" (Gasił, 1920) by GeorgKaiser (1878-1945); “Mass Man” (Masse-Mensch, 1921), “Eugen the Unfortunate” (Hinkemann, 1923) by E. Toller.

The expressionist is interested not so much in the subject of the image as in the release of his own creative energies, in what he can add to the play “on his own.” Associated with this is the phenomenon of “I-drama” (“Ich-Drama”), “drama-scream” - a play built around one central character striving for maximum self-expression, which is suppressed in every possible way by the civilization of cities, banks, and factories. He, like the expressionist artist himself, sees himself as a prophet and seer. His task is to deform the framework of everyday life, to break through the “case” of stereotypes by any means and thereby prepare for the “ascent” of a person (this motif was often duplicated on stage with a staircase).

The other characters in the “I-drama” and the plot outline itself play only a service role. Everything is subordinated to the revelation of one consciousness and is presented through its prism. The scene of action and the characters of the play exist exclusively in the perception of the central character (“I”) and seem to be called out of oblivion by his ecstatic monologues. Space is deprived of any specific social signs, because, on the one hand, it is a visionary continuation of the “I”, and on the other hand, it is conceived not as a specific place of action, but as space, the universe. Such duality is natural, because the expressionist felt like a lone dreamer, thrown into universal chaos.

The word in an expressionist play prevails over action. Ecstatic language violates the laws of grammar and is built on deliberately irregular, confusing rhythms. Monologue is the only way of self-disclosure known to the heroes of expressionist plays. The interlocutors are actually conducting two parallel developing monologues; they listen only to themselves. A discovery for the theater of the 20th century was that the dramatic person speaks not in order to be heard, but in order to speak his horror, overcome the fear of loneliness, and give a universal scale to the imagery of his consciousness. If the expressionist drama is full of the Idea’s struggle for its rights, then it is difficult to call it “disputable”, since the central character looks more like a madman waving a sword in the dark than a duelist ready to cross swords with a real opponent.

The innovation of the Expressionists manifested itself not only in the sphere of language. Playwrights move away from the naturalistic understanding of the character and approach the late symbolists (especially A. Strindberg) in their interpretation. The expressionist character is devoid of individual traits, comparable to a puppet driven by some mysterious forces. Hence the elements of gothic and fantasy. Expressionism diverges from symbolism in that it operates with stereotypical, and at times even caricatured, imagery. The lack of individuality turns the expressionist character not into a “name”, but into a grotesque mask.

The motif of duality, extremely important for expressionists, is central to Georg Kaiser’s drama “Coral”. The absolute resemblance of the Billionaire and his Secretary (the coral on the Secretary's watch chain is the only way to distinguish them) leads to a tragic outcome. Having shot his double, the Billionaire is not recognized and is convicted of murdering his “employer.” But he is glad to at least die like the Secretary: he possessed the main, in his opinion, value, “life - which is bright - from the very first day.” The coral removed from the Secretary's chain marks the belated acquisition of inner harmony.

The bright memories of his youth are the priceless capital that the Billionaire wants to leave as an inheritance to his son. But the young man does not want to turn a blind eye to the hardships of existence, and becomes a fireman on a coal ship. Contradicting his father, he repeats his fate in his own way.

The Billionaire's final monologue gives the image of coral a new dimension. People appear in his vision as “scattered fragments of a dying coral tree.” They are doomed to loneliness, dreaming of lost unity.

The emphasized subjectivity of the “I-drama” has a double effect. The viewer can identify himself with the character, succumb to the expression, even the magic of the image. At the same time, he is able to distance himself from it, to see the grotesque in the “mask,” as a result of which it becomes possible to look at what is happening on stage “from the outside.” The problem of “distance,” the boundary between the stage and the auditorium, the world of the play and the world beyond, becomes material for philosophizing in the theater of the 20th century. Of course, this topic is not new for the theater, but it was in the 20th century that apologists of the “fourth wall” (the border between the audience and the stage is impassable) and organizers of “happenings” (there seems to be no border at all) coexist in theatrical art. The game “on the edge” became relevant and acquired a variety of forms, receiving an original solution in the dramaturgy of JI in the 1920s. Pirandello.

Luigi Pirandello (Luigi Pirandello, 1867-1936), Italian playwright, prose writer, poet and critic, was born in Sicily, received a philological education at the University of Rome and Bonn. In 1889 he published his first collection of poems, Joyful Pain.

Turning to prose, Pirandello made his debut as a short story writer, and in 1904 he published his most famous novel, The Late Mattia Pascal. He began writing for the theater shortly before the First World War: the drama “The Vise” (La morsa) was staged in Rome (Metastasio Theater) in 1910.

Having studied the dialect of his native Sicily at the University of Bonn, Pirandello wrote several everyday comedies in it, one of which, the play “Liolä” (Liolä, 1916), was called by theater critic E. Bentley “the last Sicilian pastoral.” Philosophical and psychological dramas brought European fame to the Italian playwright. These are, first of all, tragedies: “Henry IV” (Enrico IV, 1922), which raises the question of the reasons for a person’s flight from the real world to the illusory one; “The Nudes Dress” (Vestire gli ignudi, 1922), which reveals the tragic contradiction between “face” and “mask”; “Six Characters in Search of an Author” (Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore, 1921; second ed. - 1925), dedicated to the problem of the relationship between “art” and “life”. The latter forms, together with the plays “Each in his own way” (Ciascuno a suo modo, 1924) and “Today we improvise” (Questra sera si recita a soggetto, 1930) a trilogy on the theme of “theatricality of life”, which emerges especially clearly against the backdrop of the artistic truth of the theater. In the dramas “It is so (if it seems so to you) "(Cosi e (se vi pare), 1917) and "The life that I give to you" (La vita che ti diedi, 1923) Pirandello reflects on the relativity of truth. In 1925, he opens his Teatro d'arte in Rome "(Art Theatre). In 1934, the Italian writer was awarded the Nobel Prize.

The plays of the “trilogy” are united by the use of the “stage on stage” technique, known to the playwrights of the Renaissance; Pirandello uses it to destroy stage illusion and, at the same time, to realize the belief that the whole world is a theater. This faith is far from the joyful conviction in the unlimited possibilities of the game, the beginning of the game. The world as a theater is a world of disguises, not faces and true feelings, because modern people, according to Pirandello, have forgotten how to have their own faces. In such a world, theater is “out of place.” Showing it in the form of wheels and cogs of a certain mechanism (actors, stage, characters, text of the play, prompter's booth, author), Pirandello deprives the theater of any mystery. True, this demystification turns into an exciting game in its own way.

In the play “Six Characters in Search of an Author” we witness a rehearsal of Pirandello’s own play “The Game of Interests” (I giuoco delie parti, 1918). Suddenly, six “spectators” appear on the stage, claiming that they are six Characters (Father, Mother, Stepdaughter, Son, Boy and Girl) looking for the author to ask him about the idea of ​​the play in which they are the characters. With the Director's permission, they half-tell and half-act an "unwritten comedy" consisting of a prologue and two acts. The climax of Act I is a chance meeting between Father and Stepdaughter in a visiting house. The climax of Act II is a quarrel between Mother and Son, leading to a tragic outcome - the death of a little Girl and the suicide of a fourteen-year-old Boy. The Director and Actors are discouraged by the spectacle. Three Characters - Father, Mother and Son - remain on stage, as if limiting the world of their lives to her. The stepdaughter, denying the boundary between fiction and reality, runs away into the “unknown” through the auditorium.

By starting the play with the curtain raised, Pirandello seems to make us believe in the identity of reality on stage and in the auditorium. So, the Actors run from the stage to the stalls, sharing with the audience the bewilderment about the “ghost” of Madame Pace that appeared to them. However, the Characters cannot do this; their existence is limited precisely to the stage, which does not prevent them, however, from appearing not from behind the scenes, but from the side of the auditorium, as if “from the street.”

Pirandello specifically stipulates the need not to confuse the Actors and the six Characters. The difference between these groups of characters is emphasized by their respective location on the stage, as well as by lighting effects, special masks and costumes of the Characters. In the famous production by J. Pitoev (Parisian Théâtre de Champs-à-Elisay, 1923), at the beginning of the performance the actors, dressed in casual costumes, walked onto the stage through the auditorium. But the Characters did not at all follow the theater usher “down the aisle between the chairs to the stage,” “embarrassed and confused, constantly looking around” (according to the author’s remarks). All six were effectively lowered onto the stage in a special cradle, illuminating the event with a bright green light.

The play masterfully interweaves a melodramatic plot and a discussion of the problems of creativity, which receive either an ironic or paradoxical interpretation. What is the relationship between reality, truth and verisimilitude? What is more truthful—life or art, and how relevant are the criteria of verisimilitude to life? In the essay “On the scrupulous considerations of creative fantasy” (Ąwertenza sugli scrupoli delia fantasia, 1921), Pirandello notes that life, even if it is full of absurdities, is so true that it does not need any verisimilitude. Art that deals with fiction strives to be similar to truth. But here lies the paradox: the fictional Characters of the play insist that their story has nothing to do with fiction, but happened “for real.” Replacing the question with a counter-question, Pirandello builds a complex Socratic dialogue on the topic of truth.

Accordingly, the viewer is faced with the need to decide who is more real, truer—the character, a “real living character,” or a living person? The reality of a person is constantly changing, the reality of a character is unchanged. “We don’t change,” Father shouts to the Director, “we cannot change, become “different”; we are who we are (it's scary, isn't it, Mr. Director?). And we will always remain like that!” In other words, if a person’s life has three dimensions (past, present and future), the boundary between which is constantly being recreated, then the character is locked in the present, as if within four walls, for him everything happens “now”, and at the same time, as states Mother, “always happens.” Thus, in a person’s life, which knows no constants, the illusory manifests itself much more strongly than in the once and for all determined reality of the character.

While the performance lasts, Pirandello claims, the Character is more alive and real than the actors and spectators. The stage is his element, the very guarantee of “existence.” Just as “you can be born as a tree or a cobblestone, water, a moth or... a woman,” so you can be born as a theatrical character. However, all these “incarnations” are equally illusory. Man and character, nature and art are therefore not equally real, but equally fictional. The character is endowed with one mask, while the person has to manipulate several.

So, theatricality in the drama “Six Characters in Search of an Author” is both the highest type of illusion, a triumph of creativity, and the tragedy of life, in which a person is doomed to play a role unknown to him. The Director’s exclamation “Light! Light! Give me light!”, the contrasting change of light and darkness, the bluish glow that fills the stage - all this conveys the idea of ​​​​the need to become spiritually sighted, to overcome the border of deceptive appearances.

Representatives of the poetic theater of the 20th century (F. Garcia Lorca, J. Cocteau, early J. Anouilh, early T. Williams) understand theatricality differently. They see its quintessence in “poetry” contained in theatrical means of expression - scenography, plastic, sound design of the performance.

According to J. Cocteau, the author of the famous play about Orpheus (Orpheus, 1928), traditional “theatrical poetry” (poesie de theatre), dramas in verse, should be contrasted with the poetry of theater as such, and the emphasis should be shifted from the text of the play to its stage embodiment. This point of view is characteristic of representatives of the surrealist theater, for whom the word, an element of rational order, had to be subordinated to the spectacular and sound elements of the performance.

The Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca (Federico Garcia Lorca, 1898-1936) has a slightly different view of things, striving to establish harmony between the poetic word and theatrical ingenuity. Lorca was born in an Andalusian village, near Granada. He began his literary activity while still studying at the University of Granada (collection of travel notes “Impressions and Landscapes”, Impresiones y paisajes, 1918). After graduating from university, he moved to Madrid, where he made his debut both as a playwright (fairy tale play “The Magic of the Butterfly”, El maleficio de la mariposa, 1920; music by C. Debussy) and as a poet (“Book of Poems”, Libro de poemas, 1921) . His plays testify to a careful acquaintance with Spanish theater of the 17th century and folk theater tradition. By his own admission, Lorca spent ten years studying Spanish folklore “not as a scientist, but as a poet.” In 1933, he staged a musical performance based on Spanish folk songs, and from 1931 to 1933 he headed the student theater "La Barraca" (Spanish - "Balagan").

Lorca defined the genre of the heroic-romantic drama “Mariana Pineda” (1927) as “a folk romance in three prints,” thus emphasizing the combination of the lyrical musicality of the drama, its “songability,” with the special nature of entertainment. The fabric of Lorca's dramas is organically woven into the poetic and musical elements, as well as symbolically conventional scenography.

Lorca's other plays are extremely diverse in genre. The “cruel farce” “The Wonderful Shoemaker” (La zapatera prodigiosa, 1930) is in the spirit of an Andalusian folk comic performance. “The play “The Love of Don Perlimplin” (Amor de don Perlimplin con Beiisa en su jardin, 1931, post. 1933) is written in the tradition of folk tragedy, and “Don Cristobal’s Showcase” (Retablillo de don Cristobal, 1931) is in the genre of farce for puppetry theater; The play “When Five Years Pass” (Asi que pasen cinco ańos, 1938) is a “legend of time”, or, according to the author’s definition, “a mystery in prose and verse.”

Poetic theater, according to Lorca, involves the combination of lyrical and dramatic principles in one work. In an interview in 1935, he admitted that the dramatic element certainly predominates in him: “I am more interested in people than in the landscape in which they are embedded. I, of course, am capable of contemplating a mountain range for a quarter of an hour, but still I will definitely go down to the valley to talk with a shepherd or a woodcutter.” Poetry is a contemplative and “ideal” principle, theater is active and consisting of “flesh and blood.” “Theater is poetry that has risen from the pages of a book and taken on flesh. And then she speaks, screams, sobs if despair sets in. The characters entering the stage must be filled with poetry, but at the same time they must be alive - made of flesh and blood. The theater requires this." On the one hand, poetry is literally present in Lorca’s plays: his characters sing and speak in verse. On the other hand, poetry is the spirit of the performance, its rhythm. Theater gives poetry a voice, a form of expression of emotions, and gives life to mysterious and illogical poetic imagery.

Feeling the connection of his drama with the traditions of Spanish theater, Lorca spoke about the need to return tragedy to the modern stage. “Bloody Wedding” (Bodas de sangre, 1933), “Yerma” (1934) and “The House of Bernarda Alba” (La casa de Bernarda Alba, 1936, published 1945) are among the most striking examples of this genre in the XX theater century-. Blood Wedding takes place in a village in southern Spain. On her wedding day, the Bride runs away with her former lover, Leonardo Felix, the only character in the play who has a name. The Groom with his relatives and the Bride's relatives rush into pursuit, ending in the death of both Leonardo and the Groom.

The play begins with a tense, deliberately laconic dialogue between Mother and Groom. The author's remark (“a room painted yellow”) is equally laconic. Nothing more is said about the situation. Unlike the stage directions of a naturalistic play, which scrupulously describe the characters’ habitat, the stage directions for “Bloody Wedding” are focused not on the life-like appearance of the scene, but on creating the atmosphere and mood of a particular scene. Thus, the colors begin to acquire an allegorical meaning (white - wedding, red - blood). Hinting at the symbolic dimension of what is happening, they also interact with other stage effects (light, sound). The darkness of night enveloping the meeting of the Bride and Leonardo in the 1st scene of Act II; gives way to the dawn of the upcoming wedding day, but the 2nd scene (ending with the escape of the Bride and Leonardo) is done in cold gray, blue and silver tones, as if foreshadowing the ominous blue glow of the Moon in the fateful III act.

The scene in the yellow room is full of foreboding and omens. Having lost her husband and son, Mother anxiously asks why her last son takes a knife with him. She angrily takes up arms against all weapons - “everything that can kill a man.” The main oppositions of the play are quickly outlined. On one side are vineyards, olive trees, earth, motherhood, the world of women; on the other - guns and pistols, pride and family honor, the world of men. And between these worlds there is blood, both inextricably and forever connecting (kinship), and forever, “until the grave,” separating (blood feud).

The mental state of the characters is echoed by natural phenomena: heat, “the blood of dawn in the sky,” a rapid stream, dark groves, the moon taking the form of a young woodcutter with a pale face (one of the characters in the play). Also, Death, in the guise of a Beggar Woman, takes part in what is happening. Nature not only corresponds to the experiences and actions of the characters, but controls them. The death of Leonardo and the Groom is the result of a conspiracy between the Moon and Death. Having responded to the call of blood, the Bride and Leonardo inevitably find themselves at the mercy of inexorable cosmic forces.

The pattern of their death is obvious for the three woodcutters who appear in the 1st scene of Act III to the sounds of violins and play the role of an ancient choir. On the one hand, they defend the laws of the clan, on the other, they put the law of nature, blood above human laws (“We must follow the command of blood”) and, sympathizing with the lovers, they conjure death: “Sad death! Leave them / For love a green shelter.” But the frequent mention of death is also a call for its appearance. “The moon is rising,” says the third woodcutter, and then, as if responding to his calls, the moonlight gradually floods the stage. The role of woodcutters is paradoxical. They attract trouble and cry over it.

The quality of lullabies in the play is similar. They are imbued with a premonition of impending trouble and grief about it, inevitable in the life of every person. Thus, what happens in the tragedy, in addition to its specific side, also has a universal character (love, death, the irreversible passage of time, loneliness). Therefore, the characters in “Bloody Wedding” (with the exception of Leonardo) are deprived of individual names - Mother, Groom, Bride. They are “poetic versions of human souls” (Lorca). And although the language and tunes of Andalusia give these “souls” a national identity, the local flavor is secondary for the playwright. “I could embody this myth of the human soul,” Lorca said about “The Wonderful Shoemaker,” in Eskimo flavor.”

At the end of his life, Lorca (he was shot during the Spanish Civil War) came up with the idea of ​​a “theater of social action” that could point out both the decline of the nation and the path to the revival of the country.

In the 1930s, the position on the public purpose of theater was most consistently defended by Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956). If Lorca believed that a performance is capable of changing the “way of feeling” of the audience, forcing the audience and actors to unite in a single emotional impulse, then Brecht relies not on feeling, but on reason, the work of thought awakened by the theater.

B. Brecht, a German playwright, poet, publicist and theater figure, was born in Augsburg, studied medicine at the University of Munich, and worked as a nurse in a military hospital. Having established himself as a poet, he turned to the theater: “Baal” (Baal, 1918, post. 1923), “Drums in the Night” (Trommeln in der Nacht, 1919, post. 1922), “In the Jungle of Cities” (Im Dickicht der Städte, 1921 - 1924). In 1924, Brecht moved to Berlin and worked for two years at the Deutsches Theater under the direction of Max Reinhardt. Collaboration (1927) with Erwin Piscator (1893-1966), one of the outstanding directors, influenced further dramatic searches: “The Threepenny Opera” (Die Dreigroschenoper, 1928), “St. Joan of the Slaughterhouses” (Die heilige Johanna der Schlachthöfe, 1929 -1930).

The name of Brecht is traditionally associated with the concept of “epic theater”. In the 1920s, Piscator contrasted modern theater with “Aristotelian” theater, or in other words, with dramaturgy based on dramatic tension, the creation of stage illusion and audience empathy for the feelings and actions of the hero. Brecht reinforces this thesis of Piscator. He denies the Aristotelian doctrine of catharsis. As is known, tragedy, according to Aristotle’s Poetics, should arouse alternately fear and compassion in the viewer, leading to the highest emotional tension, in order to be resolved in the finale by the harmonious reconciliation of these passions. This, according to Brecht, gave ancient Greek tragedy its scenic appeal. The tragedy began to seem “beautiful” to the viewer, aesthetically justified. Accordingly, misfortune, suffering, defeat were mythologized by the theater and, in this “gilded” form, were presented as a force ennobling the public. “Do you know how pearls are created in the Margaritifera shell? - Brecht's Galileo comments on this situation. “This oyster becomes fatally ill when some foreign body, such as a grain of sand, penetrates it. She locks this grain of sand into a ball of mucus. She almost dies in the process. To hell with pearls, I prefer healthy oysters.”

Such an observation by Brecht was not isolated.

For example, the German existentialist philosopher K. Jaspers in his work “On Truth” (Von der Wahrheit, 1947) draws attention to the fact that spectator empathy for a character leads to a dual feeling - involvement in what is happening and detachment from it. This detachment gives rise to a pleasant feeling of security and turns the viewer not into a participant, but only into a witness to a tragedy that, by and large, “doesn’t concern” him.

Brecht strives to return a kind of educational function to the theater. The theater should become a school for the viewer, awakening his social and critical activity. The audience is called upon not to enjoy illusory joys or suffering, but through the performance to determine their attitude to current events in social and political life. "Epic" in this sense means covering extensive socio-historical material. Not content with a fragment of reality, “epic theater” strives to show it comprehensively, “philosophically.” The author's thought should provoke the viewer's thought. Brecht's goal is to transform the viewer from a “consumer” of the performance into its co-creator. To do this, he introduces a technique called “alienation” (Verfremdungseffekt). The meaning of this technique is to present a phenomenon well known to the viewer from an unexpected side. Brecht achieves the debunking of “capital” or “convenient” truths in various ways.

Firstly, through the projection of various photographs and inscriptions, as well as changing the scenery in front of the audience, he destroys the illusion of the events depicted on stage. “Documentaryization” of the theater is a response to the challenge of modernity with its cult of cinema and newspaper news. Secondly, Brecht reduces dramatic tension by introducing special functional scenes into the play. Playwrights even before Brecht resorted to effects to create a distance between the story of events and their “showing”. Such are the messenger, herald, “theater director” in Goethe, “announcing” P. Claudel. Brecht especially emphasizes the author's intervention in the development of action, that is, he focuses on a certain point of view. To fix the viewer’s attention on the thoughts that are most important to him, Brecht introduces “zongs” into the play (as in political cabarets of the contemporary playwright), choirs, and direct addresses of the actors to the audience.

The play “Mother Courage and Her Children” (Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder, 1941) can be considered as a striking example of the aesthetics of “epic theater”. Success came to her after a production on stage at the Deutsches Theater (1949); it increased even more after the 1951 production, carried out by Brecht in the Berliner Ensemble theater he created. The play chronicles the travels of sutler Anna Vierling, nicknamed Mother Courage, and her three children (Catherine, Eilif, Schweitzerkas) during the Thirty Years' War (1616-1648). To feed her family, she travels first with the Protestant army and then with the Catholics. The setting of the play, written by Brecht in exile, is especially significant for the German audience: the Thirty Years' War was one of the most destructive for Germany. The twelve scenes of Mother Courage represent a kind of free composition, a discordant choir of voices. The main action in it, although visible, does not reach a climax anywhere, which corresponds to the author’s intention. It is illustrated, for example, by scene 3. The “honest son” Courage Schweitzerkas is shot by Catholics. When his corpse is brought out for identification by his mother and sister, in order to save their lives, they are forced to abandon their son and brother. The scene ends with the Sergeant Major saying, “Throw him in the dump. Nobody knows him." However, already in the next, 4th scene, Mother Courage appears in a somewhat comic form. Outraged by the illegal fine of five thalers, she demands a meeting with the captain. In the same scene, in “Song of Great Humility,” she sings of the tolerance and ability to compromise that life has taught her. So the death of a son turns into just one of the practical lessons of war.

Courage is both a heroine and a pseudo-heroine. This is revealed in the play both through the clash of characters (talkative Courage / silent Catherine) and through “zongs” - the main weapon of Brechtian irony. The philosophy of Courage, based on the wise acceptance of life as it is (the song “Song of Great Humility” in the 4th scene), is brought by the playwright to the grotesque, to the understanding of the vulnerability and fatality of compromises. In other words, thanks to “The Song,” Brecht manages to reveal the falsity of those values ​​that, at first glance, are presented in the play as positive. Mother Courage, emphasizes the Russian researcher A. A. Fedorov, “does not see the light, having survived the shock, she learns “no more about its nature than a guinea pig about the law of biology.” The tragic (personal and historical) experience, while enriching the viewer, taught her nothing ... The catharsis she experienced turned out to be completely fruitless.” Courage's wisdom is her ignorance. True knowledge of the tragedy of war and the tragedy of life in general, according to Brecht, requires not emotional reactions (they are relative), not reliance on generally accepted norms, not religious faith, but the work of the intellect, free thought. This stage solution also has a theatrical aspect. Brecht, creating and destroying the illusion, fights precisely with the uncontrollable emotion of the audience, just as G. Craig and A. Ya. Tairov fought with the uncontrollable emotion of the actor in their concepts of “super-puppet” and “super-actor”.

So, the viewer in some episodes can sympathize with Courage, but never identifies himself with her. The heroine of the play is unpredictable: she either curses the war, or again takes part in it. However, what is ultimately important is not what Courage takes away from the experience of war, but the viewer’s reaction to its metamorphoses. Examples of Brecht's “epic theater” include the parabolic play “The Good Man from Sezuan” (Der gute Mensch von Sezuan, 1939-1941, post. 1943), the drama “The Life of Galileo” (Leben des Galilei, 1938-1939; post. early edition - 1943; final English version - 1947), parable play "The Caucasian Chalk Circle" (Der Kaukasische Kreidekreis, 1943-1944, final 1948). According to his aesthetic program, Brecht revised Antigone by Sophocles (Antigone, 1948), The Beaver Coat by G. Hauptmann (Der Biberpelz, 1951), and Coriolanus by W. Shakespeare (Coriolanus, 1952).

The play "The Life of Galileo" consists of 15 scenes and covers the years 1609-1637. Reflecting on the genius of the Renaissance, who renounced his discovery, Brecht also reflects on matters relevant in the 20th century - the contradiction between high theoretical knowledge and its often criminal practical application, between scientific and technical discoveries and philosophical conclusions from them. The thematic layer of the play is therefore extremely rich: knowledge and faith, “vigilance” and “blindness”, duty and temptation, truth and renunciation of it collide in it.

From scene I, the main virtue of a thinking person is the ability to see. In a world in which the path to knowledge lies through mastering a dead language (this is an important detail: it is repeatedly emphasized that the lens grinder, “practitioner” Federzoni does not know Latin), in which a new discovery is looked at through the prism of the teachings of the “divine” Aristotle and the Holy Scriptures , - in this world you can only believe your eyes. In scene IV, the Florentine courtiers, doubting the existence of the satellites of Jupiter, invite Galileo to hold a debate on whether such satellites can exist. To this Galileo replies: “I suppose you just look into the pipe and see.” Stars, according to Galileo, cannot be necessary and unnecessary, existing and non-existent, if they actually exist. If new discoveries violate Aristotle's picture of the universe, this does not mean that they bring disharmony. On the contrary, they give this picture genuine, not fictitious, outlines. This desire for a more subtle understanding of the universe is associated in Galileo’s mind with poetic creativity. Just as in the eighth satire of his favorite poet Horace (the court poet) not a word can be changed, so in his Galilean picture of the universe it is impossible to change the phases of Venus. Against this, Galileo claims, his “sense of beauty” rebels.

The image of the scientist is subject to the usual “alienation” for Brecht. The fighter for the triumph of truth is completely devoid of heroic qualities. Galileo, the playwright recalls the metaphor of one of the scientist’s contemporaries, is not a lion, but a fox. He's a little bit of a gourmand, a little bit selfish and a little bit of a coward. “Suffering people bore me”; “When you are dealing with obstacles, the shortest distance between two points may be a curve” - these are the maxims of the teacher that Andrea remembers.

Considering renunciation of the truth a crime, Galileo nevertheless abandoned his discovery, fearing torture. He himself strictly judges himself for this - for giving the state the opportunity to manipulate scientific truth. The tragedy of Galileo is that his knowledge, being alienated from him, became inhuman. Brecht himself dreamed of the harmony of science and progress, high knowledge and morality.

But the condemnation of Galileo in Brecht's portrayal has exactly the same artistic persuasiveness as his justification. At the end of scene XIII there is a quote from Galileo’s “Conversations”: “Isn’t it clear that a horse, falling from a height of three or four cubits, can break its legs, while for a dog it is completely harmless...<...>The conventional wisdom that large and small machines are equally strong is obviously a fallacy.”

Brecht's theory of “epic theater,” which had a significant impact on playwrights of the 20th century, was not the only concept of “non-Aristotelian” dramaturgy. Its original interpretation was proposed by the American playwright and prose writer Thornton Wilder (1897-1975). The aesthetics of his work were influenced, on the one hand, by the tradition of Chinese theater, on the other, by the experiments of Pirandello - the play “Six Characters in Search of an Author” that he saw in Rome in 1921. Wilder’s most important technique is the use of the ramp, the presence in the play of a Presenter (or “assistant director”) commenting on the action. This figure belongs to two worlds at the same time: a “fictional” play and a real performance. Wilder resorts to the technique of editing, a free handling of stage time, the course of which is indicated not by the development of intrigue, but by repetitions. Thus, the one-act play “Long Christmas Dinner” (1931) presents ninety Christmas dinners of the Bayard family, replacing one another at an accelerated pace. Based on the same situations and speech patterns, the play, which spans ninety years, begins with the first Christmas dinner in a new house and ends with the purchase of another new house by the younger generation of the family.

The very idea of ​​time is alienated. If “The Long Christmas Dinner” plays on the idea that time “does not stand still,” then “Our Town” (1938), on the contrary, questions the irreversibility of time, the impossibility of returning the past. On the one hand, this is a polemic with the traditional structure of the play, which involves development from the beginning to the ending. On the other hand, a look at the human destiny from the position of a mysterious observer who knows the outcome of any events.

For Brecht, alienation contained a way of artistic comprehension of social contradictions. Wilder's goal is different - to comprehend the eternal laws of the universe. At the same time, Wilder follows this path using comic effects.

The play Skin of Our Teeth (1942) plays on the absurdity of the conventional wisdom about history that is ingrained in the modern American consciousness.

T. Wilder's quest comes at the time of the heyday of American theater, represented primarily by the names of Eugene O'Neill (Eugene O'Neill, 1888-1953) and Tennessee Williams (Tennessee Williams, present, name - Thomas Lanier, 1911- - 1983), author of many dramas, including A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Orpheus Descending (1957).

O'Neill made his debut as a playwright back in the 1910s; the first was his one-act play “Bound East for Cardiff” (Bound East for Cardiff, 1916), performed by the Provincetown Players troupe, which fundamentally opposed itself to Broadway. “Neil turned out to be sensitive to European theatrical trends, he was especially influenced by H. Ibsen, J. A. Strindberg, whom he considered “the harbinger of everything modern in our theater,” as well as G. Kaiser. O'Neill is attentive to specific details, to the “environment,” to the psychological development of characters in the tradition of the “new drama.” At the same time, in the 1920s, the American playwright was captured by expressionism (“The Emperor Jones,” The Emperor Jones, 1921, post. 1920; “The Shaggy Monkey”, The Hairy Are, 1922) and the poetics of the grotesque, symbolic generalization. In the late period of creativity (1930-1940s), O'Neill achieves a synthesis of specificity and convention, rare in the theater of the 20th century, which. affected his taste preferences (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Elizabethans) and the experience of processing the ancient myth - “Mourning is the fate of Electra” (Mourning Becomes Electra, 1931). However, O'Neill's main material is the reality of his native America, which, in his interpretation, is as rich in truly tragic collisions (guilt, redemption) as ancient Greek drama.

The play “Long Day's Journey into Night” (1940, publ. 1956) was published and staged only after the death of the playwright: this “family drama” was written on autobiographical material. The Tyrone family depicted in it is named after the Irish royal family.However, this circumstance emphasizes not the glory of the Tyrones, but the tragedy they are experiencing.

On an August day in 1912, while the area outside the windows of the house is gradually covered in fog, each of the four Tyrones (James, his wife Mary, their sons Jamie and Edmund) is faced with new knowledge about themselves and their loved ones. James Tyrone admits he wasted his acting talent by acting in commercial productions; Mary begins taking morphine again, depriving her husband and sons of hope for her recovery.

The eldest son, a failed actor, tries to alleviate his disappointment in life with alcohol. The younger one, an aspiring poet, learns that he is sick with tuberculosis.

O'Neill focuses on the gradual revelation of the characters' characters, gripped by hatred and love, offended and forgiving, living in the present and unable to get rid of obsessions, "legends" of the past. Detailed, with a verbal personality, the Tyrones are unique. But their hidden grievances, quarrels and reconciliations are understandable to every family.Children and parents who did not live up to each other's expectations, mutual jealousy, unfulfilled expectations (a brilliant career, their own home) - such is the cross of family idealism.

The play consists of four acts, each of which is a clearly defined phase in the “blurring of contours”, bringing the tragedy to the forefront. Her anticipation is emphasized by various details: conversations about a certain mysterious uninhabited room, about the possible diagnosis of Dr. Hardy. The fragility and even ephemerality of family harmony in the first act is hinted at by the fussy movements of Mary’s hands, Edmund’s cough, and the sound of footsteps in an empty room. All these hints become reality in the second act, and the Tyrons have no choice but to take a long journey into the night - to look into themselves and the souls of their loved ones.

Each of the Tyrones has a special outlook on life. Mary does not skimp on reproaches to her husband, but nevertheless believes that a person has no complete control over himself, that life gradually “distorts” everyone, “until there is no difference between what we are and what we would like to be.” an insurmountable wall grows up, and we forever lose our true self.” Jamie, by contrast, does not believe in anything: he hoped for his mother’s recovery, but was again deceived. His fatalism encounters the unexpected rejection of Edmund, who finds the strength to “swim against the tide”, despite his illness, to fight with fate. Of the whole family, it is the youngest Tyrone, marked with the mark of a poet, who has a future. However, he is also vulnerable in his own way, since he has a guilt complex associated with the past. Mary was given morphine for the first time after a difficult birth, so Edmund holds himself responsible for his mother's drug addiction. As “guilty without guilt,” Edmund, according to O’Neill, is similar to the heroes of ancient Greek tragedies.

What do the Tyrones oppose to the inexorable approach of “night”? — Illusions, dreams, creativity. At the end of the play, Mary Tyrone's drug-induced hallucinations take her back to her days as a convent girl. Her final monologue is dedicated to meeting James, her first love. Mary refuses to remember what happened next in her fate. Only in the past, in her opinion, can one discover what the present has forever lost - innocence, happiness, faith.

One August day - the Tyrone's whole life in miniature. It balances on the edge of reality and sleep and threatens to turn into absurdity. And yet the long day does not pass without leaving a trace for the four characters. Love and hatred, which do not allow them to part, force the Tyrones to meet each other halfway anew every day in an almost hopeless attempt at mutual understanding.

In comparison with the dramas of O'Neill, the theater of Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) and Albert Camus (1913-1960) appears primarily as a theater of ideas, as well as a kind of commentary on prosaic and philosophical creativity - the expression of these writers. Despite the emphasized intellectualism of Sartre’s plays (“Behind a Closed Door”, Huisclos, 1944; “The Dead Without Burial”, Morts sans sépulture, 1946; “The Devil and the Lord God”, Le Diable et le Bon Dieu, 1951; “The Hermits of Altona”, Les séquestrés d "Altone, 1959) and Camus (“Caligula”, Caligula, 1938, post. 1945; “Misunderstanding”, Le Malentendu, 1944; “State of Siege”, LÉtat de siège, 1948) , their themes are very diverse, associated with the use of both mythological subjects and modern imagery.

At its emergence, existentialist dramaturgy encounters a predominantly political interpretation. Staged in occupied Paris, Les Mouches (1943) by Sartre and Antigone (1943) by Jean Anouilh (1910–1987) were perceived as manifestos of the Resistance. Indeed, Sartre saw theatrical performance as a means of pronounced moral and political influence. Anouilh was first and foremost a playwright who never forgot about the specifics of the theater. In turn, Camus sought a synthesis of philosophical and artistic ideas on stage. “The Myth of Sisyphus” (Le Mythe de Sisyphe, 1942) became a kind of manifesto of existentialist drama, and later of “drama of the absurd.”

“Theatre of situations” - this is how Sartre designated the type of his dramaturgy, emphasizing the importance of the exceptional circumstances in which he places the characters. It is these circumstances (mortal danger, crime) that give an idea of ​​what “free choice” is. In other words, the “situation” is not a gradually emerging psychological dimension, but a certain initially existing platform. On its stage, existentialist heroes struggle primarily with themselves. Charged with action, they seem to have no soul.

“Flies” Sartre refers to the ancient story of Orestes. The play begins with his return to his native Argos. Together with his sister Electra, he takes revenge on his mother and uncle for the murder of his father. Electra repents of what she did. Orestes takes responsibility for the bloodshed upon himself, but, according to Sartre, freeing his subjects from guilt in the death of Agamemnon, he renounces the throne and leaves Argos.

His action is a reproach to his compatriots. The inhabitants of Argos resigned to their fate. They repented of their crimes (as Aegisthus and Clytemnestra repented of the murder of Agamemnon) and thereby shifted their blame onto the gods. Such a denial of responsibility is tantamount to a denial of personal freedom. This repentance pleases the Olympians, as Jupiter informs King Aegisthus: “The painful secret of gods and kings: they know that people are free. People are free, Aegisthus. You know this, but they don’t.”

By exposing this lie of the gods, Orestes gradually learns who he is and what he is capable of. Skeptically assessing his previous life, the hero says to his mentor: you gave me freedom of threads, torn by the wind from the web and floating high above the ground: I weigh no more than a web and float through the air.<...>Oh, how free I am. My soul is a magnificent emptiness." The meeting with Electra, her dance at the festival of the dead, the recognition of her as a sister - all this leads Orestes to the understanding of what he must do. Faced with the impossibility of submitting to divine providence (Jupiter), Orestes is forced to create his own, deeply personal, scale of values. And these values, according to the logic of the play, are truer the less they correspond to the ideas about good and evil familiar to the inhabitants of Argos. “I must shoulder a serious crime that will drag me to the bottom - into the very depths of Argos,” Orestes says to his sister. He intends to bear personal responsibility for all the sins of Argos, but this does not mean that Orestes desires to be the atonement of other people's sins. Accordingly, having committed a crime, brother and sister behave differently. “I have done my job,” Orestes admits, “... in it is my freedom... There is only one path left for me, and God knows where it leads, but this is my path.” Orestes the exile was deprived of his homeland, mother, sister, memories; Orestes the killer immediately acquires all this. Surrounded by Erinyes flies, he finally feels like the king of his people. Electra doesn't feel free. Unlike Orestes, she cannot help but repent of what she has done, which turns her into a murderer.

The culmination of the third act is the dispute between Orestes and Jupiter, during which the Thunderer discovers in Orestes the mortal who came “to herald his twilight.” “I will not return to your natural world: thousands of paths are laid there, and all lead to you, but I can only go my own way,” says the creation to the creator. Sartre's God and free man no longer need each other. And so Orestes calls his sister to leave Argos - to know the true price of life. However, she is not ready to follow him and remains to devote her life to atonement for sin.

Like Brecht, existentialists require the viewer to be able to think. But the characters themselves often answer the questions they pose in lengthy monologues, while Brecht prefers to only ask questions through discussion and not divide the characters into clearly positive and negative ones. In this regard, it should be noted that the actions of the existentialist hero are more likely explainable not on a rational, but on an emotional level. An act that often leads to tragedy (in Anui, the voluntary death of Antigone becomes the cause of the death of Haemon and Queen Eurydice), is committed by the hero selflessly, because tragedy, as it is ironically said in “Antigone,” is “for kings.” Brecht is not interested in heroic impulses. His characters face a long series of everyday life, forcing them to use common sense. In Sartre, such common sense receives a clearly negative interpretation.

European theater of the 1950s was a meeting point of various trends. Again, in connection with the productions of previously written plays and the tour in London of the Berliner Ensemble troupe (1956), Brecht attracted attention. His plays are contrasted with a fundamentally “unbiased” drama of the absurd. At the same time, Brecht is very significant for a new generation of playwrights, the so-called “angry young people.”

The absurdity of human existence was an indispensable background for the action of the plays and novels of Sartre and Camus. It received a new understanding from Eugene Ionesco (1909-1994), Arthur Adamov (1908-1970) and Samuel Beckett (1906-1990). In 1947, “Parody” (La Parodie, post. 1952) by Adamov and “Waiting for Godot” (En attendant Godot, 1952, post. 1953) by Beckett were written, and in 1948, “The Bald Singer” (La Cantatrice chauve, 1954) Ionesco. The last of these plays was staged in 1950 at the Parisian theater Noctambul. The term “theater of the absurd” was proposed in 1961 by the English critic M. Eslin. However, it was not accepted by the “absurdists” themselves. For example, Ionesco preferred to call his theater either “theater of ridicule” or “theater of paradox.”

This emphasis is very significant. Absurdists not only reproduce a number of provisions of existentialism, but also parody them and make them the object of theatrical pranks. Therefore, Sartre’s tragedy in their interpretation becomes a tragicomedy, something specifically theatrical.

Hence the role played in the drama of the absurd by the effects of circus performances (tricks, acrobatics, clowning), as well as the manner of playing comedic roles in films. Summing up the paradoxical combination of farce, black humor and philosophical reflections in Beckett's play Waiting for Godot, J. Anouilh described it as “a sketch of Pascal's Pensées performed on a music hall stage by Fratellini's clowns.” Also noteworthy is the connection between the language of absurdist plays and English and German “nonsense poetry” (E. Lear, K. Morgenstern).

In the essay “There Will Always Be a Theater of the Absurd” (1989), Ionesco makes it clear that his theater opposed itself to both the pulp plays and the theater of Brecht. The Boulevard Theater, according to Ionesco, deals with everything trivial - the representation of everyday worries and adultery. Brecht is too politicized. Ionesco does not accept the limitations of this kind of life-likeness, which passes by our most important realities and obsessions - love, death, horror.

The development of absurd drama was influenced by surreal theatricality (the use of fancy costumes and masks, deliberately meaningless rhymes, provocative appeals to the audience). Among A. Jarry, G. Apollinaire, and A. Artaud, absurdists were especially attracted by the poetics of breaking the logical connections between the signified and the signifier.

At the same time, their style is quite original. The “absurd” is presented in the form of a game, a crude farce, and meaningless situations. The plot of the play and the behavior of the characters are incomprehensible, illogical and are sometimes intended to shock the audience. Reflecting the absurdity of mutual understanding, communication, dialogue, the play in every possible way emphasizes the lack of meaning in language, which, in the form of a kind of game without rules, becomes the main carrier of chaos.

Ionesco admitted that he owed the idea of ​​his play “The Bald Singer” to an English language self-teacher. Accordingly, his characters mechanically repeat stilted cliché phrases reminiscent of bilingual phrase books, and thereby place themselves in a world of banality taken to the extreme. According to the author, these are all the bourgeoisie, “confused by slogans, unable to think independently, but repeating ready-made, that is, dead, truths imposed by others” (“Talk about my theater and about other people’s conversations”, Propos sur mon théâtre et sur les propos des autres, 1962). Ionesco’s characters do not so much play with words as they are manipulated by other people’s words.

For some playwrights, absurdity was a philosophical credo: the “dark” plays of S. Beckett and W. Hildesheimer (1916-1991) demonstrate how nightmarish human existence is in universal chaos. For Ionesco, the absurdity of existence is not a tragedy, but a farce, containing inexhaustible possibilities for stage experimentation. In the dramas of Max Frisch and Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990) one can find elements of what critics have defined as satirical absurdity.

One of the most original absurdist playwrights, Samuel Beckett was born in Foxrock (near Dublin), into a family of Irish Protestants. In 1927 he graduated from Trinity College, where he studied French and Italian literature. In 1929, he met Joyce in Paris, became his literary secretary, and participated in the translation into French of a fragment of Finnegans Wake. In 1934, Beckett's first collection of short stories, More Pricks than Kicks, was published, and in 1938, the novel Murphy was published. From his French-language prose, the trilogy should be mentioned: “Molloy” (Molloy, 1951), “Malone dies” (Malone meurt, 1951), “Nameless” (L"Innommable, 1953). From Beckett’s dramatic works let’s call “The End of the Game” (Fin de partie, 1957), radio play “All that Fall” (1957), “Krapp’s Last Tape” (1958), “Happy Days” (1961). In 1969, Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize.

The play “Waiting for Godot” is one of those works that influenced the appearance of the 20th century theater as a whole. Beckett fundamentally refuses any dramatic conflict, the plot familiar to the viewer, advises P. Hall, who directed the first English-language production of the play, to prolong the pauses as much as possible and literally make the viewer bored. Estragon’s complaint “nothing happens, no one comes, no one leaves, terrible!” is both the quintessence of the characters’ worldview and a formula that marks a break with the previous theatrical tradition.

The characters of the play - Vladimir (Didi) and Estragon (Togo) - are like two clowns, out of nothing to do, entertaining each other and at the same time the audience. Didi and Togo do not act, but imitate some action. This performance is not aimed at revealing the psychology of the characters. The action does not develop linearly, but moves in a circle, clinging to refrains (“we are waiting for Godot”, “what are we going to do now?”, “let’s get out of here”), which are generated by one randomly dropped remark. Here is a typical sample of dialogue: “What should I say?/Say: I’m glad./I’m glad./Me too. / Me too./ We are glad./ We are glad. (Pause.) And now that everyone is happy, what will we do?/ Let’s wait for Godot.” Not only the lines are repeated, but also the situations: Estragon asks Vladimir for carrots, Vladimir and Estragon decide to separate and stay together (“It’s so hard with you, Gogo./ So we have to separate./ You always say that. And you always come back”). At the end of both acts, the Boy sent by the mythical Godot appears and reports that Monsieur will come not today, but tomorrow. As a result, the characters decide to leave, but do not move.

The fundamental difference between Beckett's play and previous dramas that broke with the tradition of psychological theater is that no one had previously set as their goal to dramatize “nothing.” Beckett allows the play to develop “word by word”, despite the fact that the conversation begins “out of the blue” and comes to nothing, as if the characters initially know that they will not be able to agree on anything, that play on words is the only option for communication and rapprochement. Thus, dialogue becomes an end in itself: “For now, let’s talk calmly, since we cannot remain silent.”

Nevertheless, there is a certain dynamics in the play. Everything is repeated, changing just enough to involuntarily “fuel” the audience’s impatient expectation of some significant changes. At the beginning of Act II, the tree, the only attribute of the landscape, is covered with leaves, but the essence of this event eludes the characters and the audience. This is clearly not a sign of the onset of spring, the forward movement of time. If, after all, a tree symbolizes the change of seasons, it is only to emphasize its meaninglessness, the falsity of any expectations.

In Beckett's later plays, the lyrical element begins to predominate and at the same time the actual dramatic elements decrease. The hero of the monodrama “Krapp's Last Tape” was used to summing up the past year on his birthday and recording his monologue on a tape recorder. Listening to a thirty-year-old tape, old man Krapp begins a conversation with his former self. What distinguishes him from the characters in the programmatic drama of the absurd is the desire to somehow structure the time of his life. On the one hand, Krapp, an infinitely lonely man, needs recordings of his own voice to confirm that the past is not a chimera. On the other hand, the film, which can be rewinded and forwarded, allows Krapp to direct the play of his own life, repeating one episode and skipping another. Thus, separating, in his own words, “the grain from the chaff,” he intuitively looks for meaning where it may have been absent at first.

The Theater of the Absurd builds its mythology on metaphors. They are based on everyday little things, shown large and in detail, and repeated banal phrases. Absurdists play up the situation of a family dinner, waiting, meeting, communicating between two people in such a way that the characters in their plays acquire the properties of individuals without individuality - a kind of walking caricature, which at the same time contains something inherently human, both funny and sad.

Young English playwrights, the so-called “angry” ones, John Osborne (1929-1994), Robert Bolt (p. 1924), Arnold Wesker (p. 1932), who first loudly declared themselves by staging the play Osborne's Look Back in Anger (post. 1956), on the contrary, is interested in individual human character, and not in a universal symbolic generalization, an intellectual drama. Wesker's neo-naturalistic experiments were called "kitchen sink drama". Everyday life and everyday life became such important motives for the “angry” because they decided to oppose “real” life to the bankrupt ideals of the older generation. The kitchen seemed to them in every respect more authentic than the salons and living rooms. Returning to the experience of the “new drama” (especially German), young English playwrights are looking for extreme, in their own expressive, manifestations of everyday life: instead of colloquial speech, professional jargon and regional dialects are heard in their plays, and the action often takes place in slums, prisons, public houses.

Not only the “angry” and absurdists (elements of the symbolist puppet theater) turned to the experience of the past. The dramaturgy of the Swiss Max Frisch (Mach Frisch, 1911 - 1991) was influenced by expressionist drama, the “epic theater” of B. Brecht, and the philosophy of existentialism (especially in the interpretation given to it by K. Jaspers). Frisch’s expressionism is related to the poetics of his “model plays” (“Count Ederland”, Graf Öderland, 1951, ed. 1961; “Biederman and the Arsonists”, Biedermann und die Brandstifter, 1958; “Andorra”, Andorra, 1961), the purpose of which is to present the essence of the phenomenon, abstracting from everything random. This is supported by the montage of various time layers (“Santa Cruz”, Santa Cruz, 1944), free transitions from external events to the inner world of the characters. Using the Brechtian method of alienation, Frisch sets himself different tasks than his predecessor. It is necessary to distance oneself from reality in order to comprehend not so much socio-political paradoxes as the tragic paradoxes of the consciousness of modern man, the main one of which is the loss of self-identity. Frisch's hero is forced to try on various masks, but he is uncomfortable in each of them.

In the comedy “Don Juan, or the Love of Geometry” (Don Juan, oder Die Liebe zur Geometrie, 1953, second edition 1962), the problem of “mask” and “face” is connected with the very element of the theater: the scene is “theatrical Seville”, the time of action is “the era of beautiful costumes.” At the center of the play is Don Juan, a captive of a theatrical tradition dating back to Tirso de Molina.

It is in a dispute with traditional audience expectations that Frisch’s image of Don Juan is built. He doesn’t want to know women, his beloved is geometry, so Frishev’s hero plays chess in a brothel. For him, hypertrophied sensuality is a role imposed by society. Love for geometry is the formula he found for a purely rational, emphatically ironic opposition to it. “I believe, Sganarelle,” says Molière’s Don Juan to his servant, “that twice two is four, and twice four is eight.” Then Sganarelle proclaims arithmetic as the religion of his master. Continuing Moliere’s thought in his own way (Don Juan confesses to his friend Don Roderigo: “I am sober and cheerful and completely overwhelmed by the only feeling worthy of a man - the love of geometry.<...>I am a fan of perfection, my friend, sober calculation, precision. I am afraid of the quagmire of our moods"), Frisch transformed the image of the “Sevillian mischief maker” into a “geometrician”, a reflective skeptic and an aesthetician. A rationalist and “aesthetic man” - such is Don Juan and in “Either - Or” (1843) by S. Kierkegaard - Frisch’s hero runs away from any restrictions on his freedom.

The theme of an unwilling role is also central to Englishman Tom Stoppard's (b. 1937) play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, originally written as a one-act farce and performed in 1966. at the Edinburgh Festival.

The main characters, Ros and Gil, amuse themselves at the beginning of the play by playing toss, as if parodying the Beckett couple Didi and Togo. Unlike Beckett's characters, they do not languish in anticipation of the unknown, but, like actors, are busy in the production of Hamlet. Ros and Gil have found their author and are forced to submit to his literary will, not knowing where it will lead them. It would seem that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who are confused by the king and the queen and who themselves become confused as a result, are just ridiculous. But by the end of the play, their fate takes on the character of a parable about the tragedy of the unknown and punishment without guilt. Didi and Togo did not think about the question “to be or not to be,” but Stoppard’s characters suddenly realize with all clarity that “not to be” is scary. “We didn’t do anything wrong, did we?” No one! Is it true?" - Rosencrantz shouts. “I don’t remember,” Guildenstern answers him. Their disappearance-death does not change anything: the last scene of Hamlet was successfully played without them.

Stoppard's play clearly indicates that a mask or a role has long ceased to be a refuge from a crazy world. Pirandello's characters gravitated to the stage to “live.” Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have not left the stage for several centuries and have long forgotten “what it all was about,” “when it began.”

Of the playwright’s later plays, we can name the following: “The Real Inspector Hound” (1968), “Night and Day” (1978), “The Real Thing” (1982), “Arcadia” ( Arcadia, 1993), “The Coast of Utopia” (2002).

Despite its flourishing in the second half of the 20th century. political theater (the dramaturgy of the Frenchman A. Gatti, the Englishman H. Brenton, the experiments of the American theater "Living Theater", the late plays of E. Albee), addressed to the pressing problems of today, many playwrights continue to be interested in timeless themes. The characters in their plays try to contrast the feeling of chaos and absurdity of the world around them with a search for the absolute.

This issue occupies, in particular, the English playwright Peter Levin Shaffer (p. 1926). He became famous for staging his first play, Five Finger Exercise (1958), which was on stage for two years, first in London, then in New York and later filmed.

A significant phenomenon in the world theater of the 1970s was Schaeffer’s play “Equus” (Equus, 1973), which captured the tossing and duality of young Helen Strang. An unusual collision is at the center of the play Lettice and Datura (Lettice and Lovage, 1988), where illusion and reality, play and life are intertwined into one indissoluble whole, both inspiredly theatrical and psychologically authentic. In the play “The Gift if the Gorgon” (post. 1992), Schaeffer turns to the style of ritual theater, which, according to the playwright, should lead the viewer through the experience of horror to truth and unity. A similar perception of theater as a kind of religious cult was already latently felt in the early Schaeffer.

The central character of the drama “The Royal Hunt of the Sun” (1964) is the Spanish general Francisco Pissaro. He is obsessed with the search for a this-worldly earthly god who can restore meaning and harmony to the world. The motive of the search for God is woven by the author into the historical plot - the conquest of the Inca Empire by the Spaniards at the beginning of the 16th century. In Act I of the play (“The Hunt”), Pissaro, who went with his army for gold, learns about King Atahualpa, whom the Incas worship as a sun deity. The conquistadors take him prisoner, having dealt with three thousand Indians. In Act II (“The Murder”), the Incas collect a ransom for their king, and Pissaro, for whom Christian values ​​have long become empty words, is ready to believe in the immortality of the “son of the sun,” Atahualpa. However, this faith is dashed. Exposing pagan superstitions, the Spaniards kill Atahualpa, and Pissaro is deprived of his personal god.

Beginning as a historical play, The Royal Hunt for the Sun turns out to be extremely multifaceted. Its most important collision is the collision of European culture with the world of the Incas, who did not forget how to sacredly honor the laws of nature and retained a poetic view of existence. Most of all, the European Pissarro fears merciless time, which inexorably brings him closer to death. He is obsessed with the idea of ​​stopping time and thus gaining “eternal” earthly life. Pissaro saw the promise of a stable, unchanging order in the very way of life of the Incas, whose existence was in harmony with the majestic natural rhythms. For the Incas, everything is on time: harvest, wedding, death. The Franciscan priest who accompanies the army and converts the pagans to Christianity sees in this ritualized world a “pathetic copy of eternity.” He points out to Pissaro that a once and for all established routine deprives a person of the right to choose, and therefore to love. The Franciscan does not believe that Pissarro is ready to liken himself to a “corn shoot.” For the general, the need for choice, inherent in Christianity, is associated with dissatisfaction with oneself, hunger, and concern for the future.

In Europe, he is constantly tempted by hope, the other side of which for him is despair. If the Franciscan shrewdly discerns a devilish skill in the “order” and collectivism of the Incas, then Pissarro is the last hope for happiness.

Coming from the bottom of society, growing up without a father, Pissarro learned from childhood what it meant to be an outcast. He can neither read nor write. Deprived of mentors, he nevertheless grew up as a dreamer, whose dreams, as it turned out later, were close to the pantheism of the pagans. That is why, finding himself in the New World, he reached out to the “son of the sun.”

Schaeffer's play was made in the motley style that dominated European drama by the end of the 20th century. An element of epic theater can be considered the presence in “The Royal Hunt for the Sun” of the host, the old soldier Martin (in his youth he was Pissaro’s translator). More precisely, the viewer gets to know two Martins: the old man comments on the action, and the young man participates in it. Martin is an example of another fate associated with the loss of hopes, the overthrow of idols.

In Schaeffer, the tradition associated with Artaud's theater asserts itself more powerfully. The playwright achieves a strong emotional impact of the play by resorting to a variety of theatrical means. The soundtrack includes Indian songs, Catholic prayers, bird calls, and the ringing of bells. The organ coexists with a variety of drums, songs with instrumental music. The basis of the scenographic solution, the symbolic object, is a huge ring with twelve petals, placed in the center of the backdrop. When the petals are closed, the ring is a medallion with the emblem of the conquistadors; when they are open, a giant golden sun, the emblem of the Incas. The sack of Peru ends when the Spaniards take away the gold plates and the sun “sets” and turns into a nondescript dark frame. The symbolism of what is happening is also emphasized through pantomime (gestures and movements of the Incas; the scene of the “Great Ascension”, during which Pissaro’s army overcomes one of the Andes ridges), an integral element of Latin American theater.

“The Royal Hunt for the Sun” is a striking example of the interaction of different theatrical cultures. In the second half of the 20th century, interest in the traditional theaters of the East, Africa, and Latin America was reflected in the work of directors (A. Mnouchkine, P. Brook), who sometimes imparted an exotic flavor to both Shakespeare’s comedies and Greek tragedies. In Schaeffer's play, exoticism is a consequence of the chosen plot and a way to captivate the viewer with the expression of the ritual action.

The search for the absolute is connected in “The Royal Hunt for the Sun” with the search for God and ethical issues. The plays of the Austrian playwright Thomas Bernhard (Thomas Bernhard, 1931 -1989) proposed a different direction of this search (and a different stage language): the chaos of the world is contrasted with the “order” of art, the classicizing efforts of creativity.

This theme is most expressively presented in the play “The Power of Habit” (Die Macht der Gewohnheit, 1974), the characters of which are circus performers traveling around Europe in a van. Circus director Caribaldi rehearses F. Schubert's Trout Quintet with his Granddaughter, Juggler, Clown, and nephew (Lion Tamer). Caribaldi was imbued with the idea of ​​artistic perfectionism. “I only want perfection / and nothing else,” he says to the Juggler and the Tamer, “precision must become a habit.” But his dusty van, slowly moving towards his unloved Augsburg (Brecht’s hometown), hardly serves as a “platform” for the implementation of his daring plan. The phrase “tomorrow in Augsburg,” which is the leitmotif of the play, is indicative of a situation that turns the quintet’s flawless performance into a pipe dream. Rehearsals are disrupted every now and then.

The Germanic and Romanesque spirits in the play are clearly opposed to each other. Caribaldi despises Germany, extolling Italian musical instruments and the Spanish cellist and conductor Pablo Casals. He is echoed by the gallomaniac Juggler, who received an invitation to Bordeaux, to the Sarazan circus. The atmosphere of modern Germany, the play argues, is detrimental to art: Caribaldi's cellos sound completely different north of the Alps.

The “slaves” of art themselves endanger creativity. It is the rehearsal scene (it resembles a play within a play) that suggests an image of disorder and disharmony. In their daily lives, the four artists depend entirely on Caribaldi. But during the rehearsal, the power is on their side. Because of capricious and undisciplined performers, for twenty-two years now there has been no end in sight to “orchestra rehearsals” (familiar to the European public from F. Fellini’s film). The Juggler argues with the director, the Granddaughter constantly laughs, the Tamer is late, and when the artists are finally ready to play, Caribaldi himself begins to suffer from rheumatism. He always reminds himself of himself in the German world, when he finds himself in it, the director is invariably “upset,” just as his instruments, with which he has become close, are also upset. The episode at the end of scene I is indicative: secretly from the Juggler, Caribaldi moves the cello bow along his wooden leg. And just as the sound of Italian instruments changes in the northern climate, so, probably, the sonorous Italian name “Garibaldi” is deafened in German speech.

Caribaldi fears his artists no less than the Tamer fears lions. None of them like the quintet or their instruments. But Caribaldi's selection is limited. And trying to make musicians out of circus performers, he remains faithful to his dream of a concert. But the same dream makes Caribaldi unhappy and even causes him to hate music. ... we don’t even accept life / but we have to live / We hate the Trout quintet / but we have to play,” he mumbles. These words about love-hate for creativity are echoed by one of the epigraphs to the play, taken from Artaud: ... but the tribe of prophets has faded away... In other words, Bernhard doubts the possibilities of classical art. Doesn't it contrast the lies of the modern world with another, much more subtle lie? Then why does Caribaldi, in spite of everything, quote (and therefore read) Novalis and play Schubert? On the one hand, he gives in to the “force of habit”, the craving for perfection, and touches beauty, if not as a creator, then at least as a virtuoso performer. On the other hand, Caribaldi is quite capable of elevating the rehearsals themselves to the rank of art, that merciless struggle with oneself, which one fine day will be rewarded.

The playwright owns a number of plays centered on Austrian social and political life: “The President” (Der Präsident, 1975), “To Rest” (Vor dem Ruhestand, 1979), “Heroes Square” (Heldenplatz, 1988). Modernity is not a subject of philosophical reflection or criticism; it is a material subject to deformation and caricature by Bernhard.

The fate of art in the modern world is viewed from a slightly different angle in the dramaturgy of the German Botho Strauss (Botho Strauss, p. 1944). The characters in his plays suffer from loneliness, fears, and hypochondria. Their attempts to break out of their own “I” and find ways to communicate with others either turn out to be an ordinary failure, or take on grotesque and ugly shapes. The heroine of the play “So big - and so small” (Groß und klein, 1978), having surpassed her acquaintances, “from young to old,” remains a stranger to everyone, unnecessary and, moreover, a rather absurd person. She doesn’t know that everyone lives their life alone. Strauss provides the drama “Park” (Der Park, 1983) with a very eloquent author’s introduction, clarifying the intent of the play: “Let’s imagine: a diligent modern society, almost equally far from both holy ideals and the imperishable beauties of poetry (and, moreover, quite a bit tired), instead of another myth or ideology, it suddenly fell under the magic of a great work of art. ... the characters and the very action of this play are inspired and possessed, exalted and fooled by the spirit of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Thus, by the will of Strauss, Shakespearean material becomes the frame of a modern plot. Shakespeare's Oberon and Titania are thrown out of the forest into a modern park, almost like Bernhard's Schubert Quintet - in reality, the second half of the 20th century. However, this park turns out to be much more cruel and inhumane than the “wild nature” of the old comedy...

The play Ithaka (1996) is based on the last Twelve Cantos of Homer's Odyssey. German theater critics called it one of the modern “dramas about kings.” According to the stage directions introducing the play, “Ithaca is a ‘translation of a reading of the classics into dramatic form’.” Accordingly, the material for theatrical decisions is the thoughts and associations that arise when meeting Homer. Hence the inclusion in the text of passages from Homer translated into German. Strauss entrusted the role of the ancient chorus to three “fragmentary” women (Knee, Clavicle, Wrist). Thus, the bloody reprisal of Odysseus with the suitors is presented mainly in the retelling of this discordant ensemble, which indirectly casts doubt on the justice of the royal act.

Based on the ancient epic, Strauss creates a modern utopia. The return of Homer's Odysseus becomes a metaphor for the restoration of lost unity. The state, having survived a period of anarchy, is reborn by a legitimate monarch. But “Ithaca” is not a state utopia, it is a poetic utopia. Modernity can be transformed like Ithaca. Penelope, in love, rejuvenated, is poetry itself, contrasting the chaos of the universe with the law of harmony. Strauss again, as in “The Park,” tries to captivate his contemporaries with the magic of a work of art.

At the end of the play, peace is restored to Ithaca thanks to the divine intervention of Athena. The use of the deus ex machina technique seems somewhat anachronistic. However, when applied to the topic under discussion, it is not without effectiveness. At the command of the goddess, “the death and crimes of the king will be erased from the memory of the people.” Athena, depriving the inhabitants of Ithaca of memory, abolishes history and establishes peace. This, according to Strauss, is the only possibility of harmony.

It is appropriate to contrast the pessimistic paintings of Strauss, which are very indicative of the dramaturgy of the 1990s, with a different perception of modernity. It is, for example, presented in Tom Stoppard's play Arcadia (Arcadia, 1993). The action in it takes place either at the beginning of the 19th or at the end of the 20th century. This, on the one hand, is dictated by the plot: our contemporaries are trying to discover unknown pages from Byron’s life. On the other hand, it indicates a certain author’s intention: the limited historical horizons of the characters are compensated by the “all-seeing” viewer. Accordingly, the characters in Arcadia talk about the impossibility of returning to the past, but the composition of the play (time “jumps”) allows one to doubt this. Thanks to the author’s “arbitrariness,” the past can be repeated, and both time layers of the play turn out to be closely interconnected.

This relationship is, at first glance, illogical. Thomasina (“Byron’s” line), having learned in Latin class that the Library of Alexandria burned down, laments the loss of the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles. Teacher Septimus reassures her by comparing humanity to travelers who are forced to carry their belongings with them. What is lost on the road alone will be picked up by those following. His words are confirmed when, already in the 20th century, Thomasina’s own notebook is found, in which she anticipates modern mathematical discoveries.

This episode is an illustration of the paradoxical nature of human fate and an important thought for the playwright: the inevitability of loss is not a reason for sadness, because it is knowledge about it that gives value to every moment. Herzen reflects on this after the death of his son from Stoppard’s dramatic trilogy “The Coast of Utopia” (2002): “Because children grow up, we think that the child’s task is to become an adult. But a child must be a child. Nature does not neglect the fact that it lives only for a day. It is reflected entirely, without a trace, in every moment. We would not value the lily more if it were made of flint and therefore durable. The generosity of life in its flow... The charm of fleeting life - this is one of the leitmotifs of Stoppard's last plays.

"Arcadia" is replete with biblical and literary allusions, allowing for ambiguous interpretations. Thus, the image of the forbidden fruit from the Garden of Eden is hardly intended to recall the Fall, the loss of idyllic Arcadia. The content of the play, far from moralizing, allows us to see in eating an apple from the tree of knowledge a symbol of the beginning of a new life, and not of a lost paradise. The image of fire bringing destruction is also ambiguous. When a 20th-century scientist (Bernard) reconstructs Byron's burnt letter, the viewer unfolds a plot about the possibility of recreating the “irretrievably” lost past. However, Thomasina dies in the fire. But the viewer is prepared for this event. Therefore, that scene of the play in which two couples, from the past (19th century) and the present (20th century), dance without noticing each other, is artistically justified. The rhythm of the waltz, according to Stoppard’s logic, is timeless; in the dance, death and life, the end and the beginning are reconciled.

Summarize. In the dramaturgy of the late 20th century, a variety of trends interact. In the 1960s and 1970s, it was necessary to defend the autonomy of the play from its theatrical embodiment (the French M. Vinaver, M. Deutsch, J.-P. Wenzel). In recent decades, drama has again strengthened its position. In the newest plays, the role of the monologue is great; many of them (the late dramaturgy of the German H. Müller) cannot be comprehended in traditional categories (character, conflict, development of action). A peculiar sign of the 20th century was the genre of “adaptations”, that is, free author’s translations of foreign language plays (T. Wilder writes “The Matchmaker” based on the play by the 19th century Austrian playwright I. Nestroy, J. Co. who translates “A Streetcar Named Desire” by T. Williams , J.-C. Grumbert - “Death of a Salesman” by A. Miller).

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