On Two Viewpoints on the Dramaturgical Conflict Structure: from Hegel’s Aesthetics to the Identity of the Formalists

Abstract

In Russian humanitarian knowledge, the understanding of the nature of the dramaturgical conflict was influenced by aesthetic ideas about beauty, harmony, the sublime, and the ideal, formulated by Hegel in the Lectures on Aesthetics. In line with classical concepts, the conflict is understood as a necessary condition for maintaining the compositional unity of the work and the action development, leading to the final equilibrium state of all its elements after the separation of the participants in the collision to the maximum distance. In addition to the aesthetic understanding of the conflict as the basis for the harmonic organisation of the text, an idea of the conflict as the primary condition for the development of all systems was formed. This direction is also based on the Hegelian doctrine, which, however, is not connected with his aesthetic views on art but with The Phenomenology of Spirit, explaining historical patterns and the dialectical processes of the formation of the cognising subject, embarked on the path of struggle for recognition and turned out to be an instrument for bringing the spirit to oneself. In the context of the doctrine of the absolute spirit, the concept of conflict is the bases for personality development (Freud, Vygotsky), life cycles (E.Erickson), and textual organisms (M.Bakhtin), where the collision of two forces of the emerging subject of cognition leads a stable state of the system to irreversible changes, a transition to a new quality, to a higher stage of development in the case of a productive resolution of contradictions and the emergence of a new formation that is different from the two participants in the confrontation. Throughout the 20th century, Russian humanitarian thought developed mainly under the influence of the aesthetic paradigm, as evidenced by the definitions of the dramatic conflict offered by literary theorists. Such a history has its reasons, which lie in the plane of understanding the official ideology, art and culture, reflecting the historical meaning of the revolutionary achievements of a classless and, therefore, conflict-free society, which achieved the dialectical removal of all contradictions in the main historical event. However, the Hegelian understanding of the modification of textual organisation due to a catastrophic event, a shift, underlies a theory that has not been fully mastered by the Russian tradition but which has outlined a new way of perceiving and understanding the nature of a dramatic conflict as a change in identity due to irreversible actions and a further change in the structure of the subject-text. This is Shklovsky's theory of estrangement, which expressed the essence of formal poetics but was forced out to the periphery and, for compelling historical reasons, did not receive further development in the theory of art.