LET’S READ "MOTHER COURAGE AND HER CHILDREN" (THE PLAY OF B. BRECHT IN THE PRACTICE OF TEACHING THE HISTORY OF FOREIGN LITERATURE)

Abstract

Interpretation of Brecht’s ideas and poetics, especially in publications for schoolchildren and teachers, are usually limited by scholasticism or reiteration (or by distortion) of what was said as early as in soviet times. Research aim: to find out characteristic stereotypes and errors of interpretations of drama and work of B. Brecht in the wide reader's accessible sources and to offer the own reading of the play "Mother Courage and Her Children".
 We underline that the action in Brecht’s works is fully conditional. The subtitle of the play – "The Chronicle from times of Thirty Years’ War" – does not do the literary work a "historical chronicle". It is one of the author’s techniques of the conditional image through the principle of Verfremdung – a term is given in the distorted translation from Russian as "alienation". A widespread stereotype of character perception of Mother Courage as the "bad mother", allegedly opposed against her daughter-heroine, distorts the authorial intention of the play. Brecht’s personages are conditional, not realistic ones: none is an embodiment of a psychologically integral character of the real man, everybody was the author’s megaphone of certain ideas, for criticism of public defects and crimes. Brecht showed Mother Courage as a resilient self-respectful person woman, however unable to provide the future to her children and unable to give up the chosen way of life. The eloquent symbolic motif of the play is the movement of Courage's van in a closed circle. Brecht did not go down to the dogmatic and moralizing theatre. He was a sceptic and he doubted any ideology, morality, values. He cruelly derided primitive ideas about valour and virtue, about respectability and nobleness. He bitterly mocked the weakness of mute victims of violence and lying.