IMAGES OF WRITERS-CLASSICS IN MODERN RUSSIAN DRAMA

Abstract

Modern Russian playwrights lead the game with traditional meanings of the category of an author. In this paper, different versions of classical writers’ images in the contemporary Russian dramaturgy are considered. While in some plays the author is «dying» and giving his way to a scriptor, who only rewrites the literary tradition, in others the writer becomes one of the characters. Anyway, playing with the category of the Author always means playing with the text, texts, or with the space of this writer’s creativity as well. Therefore, the article uses the intertextual method in the process of investigation. When analyzing, the classification of intertextual links developed by Natalya Fateeva on the basis of Gérard Genette and Peeter Torop’s theoretical works turned out to be particularly useful. According to this concept, the following varieties of dialogues with the literary tradition could be distinguished: directly intertextual, hypertextual and metatextual. It should be noted that contemporary Russian playwrights by transforming the ideological component (as in the case of intertexts) or the poetics of every particular creative work (as in the case of hypertexts) try to find an answer to the question how Russian literature has changed since the period of its «Golden Age».Some classic Russian men of letters are mentioned in the analyzed texts. Among them Anton Pavlovich Chekhov is undoubtedly the most popular one. Besides him there are Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gilyarovsky and Griboedov as characters in the contemporary Russian plays by Ulitskaya, Levanov, Bogayev, Vyrypaev etc. All these images are combined thanks to their conditional ontological status. In the contemporary Russian drama, they do not reflect reality but they belong to the space of cultural codes, simulacra, which refer to other empty signs.