Russian Playwright Research Articles

A.N. Ostrovsky’s Dramaturgy in Slovakia

The article examines the history of the acquaintance of Slovak literary culture and theater with the dramatic heritage of the great Russian playwright A.N. Ostrovsky. It tells in detail about the first translations of his plays into Slovak and the first experiences of productions on the professional stage (all of them are associated with the name of director J. Borodach), about the difficulties of translating some of the titles of the plays, and also traces the evolution of the perception of Ostrovsky’s work in Slovakia over the past century. The periods of greatest popularity of his plays are highlighted (1950s, 1970–80s), and an overview of the most significant Slovak theatrical productions based on his works is given. Special attention is paid to several outstanding productions of the drama «The Forest», which appeared on the Slovak theater stages in different historical periods and largely influenced the perception of this Russian author by the Slovak audience: performances of the theater «Divadlo na Korze» (1971, directed by V. Strnisko), Theater SNP in Martin (1982, directed by L. Vaydichka), theater «Astorka Korzo ’90» (1997, directed by R. Polak), Slovak Chamber Theater in Martin (2014, directed by L. Brutovsky, M. Daho), Theater J. Palarika in Trnava (2020, directed by V. Strnisko).

STATE SUPPORT FOR ALEXANDER OSTROVSKY’S SISTER AND SISTER-IN-LAW UNDER SOVIET RULE

The article examines the documents of personal pension affairs in accordance with which, personal pension provision was provided, established for services to the Soviet Republic by the great Russian playwright Alexander Ostrovsky, for his sister Mariya Nikolayevna and the widow of the eldest son Anna Nikolayevna. On the basis of archival documents of Alexander Ostrovsky’s pension affairs, the authors revealed the circumstances of the life of his relatives in the 1920s: the plight and cramped living conditions of both women; we identified the circle of people living with them: the adopted daughter of Mariya N. Ostrovskaya and two children of Anna N. Ostrovskaya. The documents of the personal file made it possible to clarify the date of death of Mariya N. Ostrovskaya. But during the work, a number of issues arose that require further consideration: it is unclear from the materials of the pension case, for which children the personal pension was assigned to the widow of the playwright’s eldest son, Anna Nikolayevna. The reason for the suspension of pension payments by Anna N. Ostrovskaya herself remains unclear. The article also highlighted the role of the leadership of the People’s Commissariat of Education of the RSFSR as an advocate for the playwright’s sister and daughter-in-law before the pension authorities.

Liviu Ciulei and The Last Ones: Between Personal Trauma, Psychodrama, and Collective Drama

This paper focuses on an early role in the theatrical career of the actor, director, and scenographer Liviu Ciulei (1923-2011), created on the stage of the theatre gifted to him by his father, the civil engineer Liviu Ciulley, in 1946. The role in question is Pyotr from the play The Last Ones by Russian playwright Maxim Gorky, which premiered at the Odeon Theatre in Bucharest on the 16th of March 1948. My point is that Liviu Ciulei was drawn to this play by a psychodramatic impulse, finding in it issues related to his father who, like the protagonist in Gorky’s play, had embroiled his family in a major scandal when his son was only thirteen years old. The season in which the play premiered was marked by the increasing interference of communist authorities in art, so the intense psychodramatic process through which Liviu Ciulei consciously or unconsciously worked through his early adolescent trauma intertwined with the collective drama represented by the imposition of the Soviet-enforced communist regime in Romania at the end of World War II. Keywords: Liviu Ciulei, The Last Ones, Gorky, psychodrama, Moreno, socialist realism, communism, theatre, Romania.

Key thematic groups of vocabulary in the comedy

INTRODUCTION. A comedy in five acts by the Russian dramatist Alexander Nikolaevich Ostrovsky “The Forest” (1823–1886) is one of the most perfect and complex in terms of plot structure of the Russian playwright. The relevance of this study is determined by the need to study the language of one of the most complex plays by A.N. Ostrovsky, the lexical and phraseological features of which have not received detailed coverage in domestic science. The purpose of the study is to identify the key thematic groups of vocabulary in the comedy of A.N. Ostrovsky “The Fo rest”.MATERIALS AND METHODS. During the analysis of linguistic units, structural-semantic and linguostylistic research methods are used.RESULTS AND DISCUSSION. Analysis of the lexical-semantic organization of A.N. Ostrovsky’s comedy “The Forest” showed that the words and phraseological units of the key semantic fields “Theater” and “The Forest” reflect the problems and conflict of the play, evaluate the characters of the work, their actions and deeds.CONCLUSION. The identified words and phraseological units, objectified by theatrical vocabulary, vocabulary of flora and fauna, are text-forming in nature and reflect the solutions to the artistic problems of the author, who uses linguistic units in both direct and figurative meanings, which often expands the semantic scope of linguistic signs.

Griboyedov’s Ball in the System of Historical Ballroom Dancing Traditions

The article deals with the ballroom dance practice peculiar to the culture of Russian society of the early 18th—19th century. Ball tradition is a “polyfunctional sociocultural phenomenon”, realizing important functions of culture, activating the process of aesthetic and ethical education of a personality involved in historical ball events. Historical ball culture is one of the forms of sociocultural practice of the nobility, which participated in dance celebrations according to the established ball structure, having a ceremonial form and its own aesthetic stylistics. One of the main motives for the fascination with balls was the aspiration of a part of the educated nobility for its own socialization within the estate. The period of flourishing of the ballroom dancing tradition fell on the second half of the 18th — first half of the 19th century. After the Imperial Court Ball in 1904 in the Winter Palace of St. Petersburg, the tradition of this type of festivities was interrupted. In the 1980s and early 1990s, through the efforts of enthusiastic constructors, ballroom dance programmes began to revive. In modern Russia, the institute of historical ballroom dancing clubs has been formed, and an institutional environment of entities engaged in the study and promotion of historical ballroom traditions is gradually forming.Ballroom culture is characterized by a whole range of developmental functions that contribute to the formation of a socially adapted personality. The author proposes to supplement the communicative and marketing group of functions, inherent in the revival of historical ballroom traditions, with the function of social mythologization. To prove this thesis, the author defines the properties of ball culture as a social myth, which possesses rationality (consciousness), conceptual development (ceremoniality), aesthetic orientation, the presence of intension, communication, presentation or marketing purposes of the groups of people involved in it.The symbolic experience of re-enactors in recreating historical dances is largely mythologemic in nature, appealing to some of today’s youth and adults. Passionate about ballroom culture under the guidance of experienced choreographers, they create memorable aesthetic ballroom symbols, involving patrons and supporters in the process. Griboyedov’s historical ballroom dance programmes are part of the institutional environment considered in this article, correspond to the style of the noble era, have a ceremonial and entertaining context and contribute to the promotion of the cultural heritage of the great Russian playwright and diplomat A.S. Griboyedov.

The Topos of Memory in A. V. Vampilov’s Dramaturgy

The relevance of the topic of the article is largely determined by stereotypical judgments about the philosophic nature of the Russian literary tradition, the inclusion of the issues raised in the problems of constantly renewed disputes about the loss of this quality in the era of socialist realism, discussions about the historical and literary status of the “Bronze Age”, when the leaders of the literary process, contrary to the already established ideas about the “thaw era”, the traditionalist writers have become the same. The author focuses on the plays of the outstanding Russian playwright Alexander Vampilov. The analytical approach is based on the topical analysis of the literary text. Topos is considered as a “structural and semantic model” (P. E. Bukharkin, I. V. Annenkova, etc.), which in the case of Vampilov has several levels of textual embodiment: the “genetic roof” of the character’s name, during the creation of which the artist restored the ancient Russian Orthodox tradition of naming; the memory motif, fixinga multi‑stage process of loss and restoration of memories; foreign genre inclusions, in particular, in the text of the play “Last Summer in Chulimsk”, the playwright used the genre of legend as a form of existence of national memory. The main conclusion: the most complex literary topos of memory, the variability of which does not prevent us from presenting the national mentality as a kind of integrity formed under the influence of the Orthodox tradition, is presented in the creative heritage of A. V. Vampilov as a special type of moral imperative, the semantic structure of which is determined by the national (historical, cultural) and personal memory, which illuminated the life of a Russian person at all times, even in the Soviet era, which is considered to be indiscriminately atheistic.

A Unique Copy of Alphabetum Russarum, Printed in Stockholm by Peter van Selow

ABSTRACT This paper describes a virtually unknown Russian alphabet table, Alphabetum Russarum. It consists of only two leaves and presents the Russian alphabet, including detailed pronunciation rules in Latin. The copy is damaged, the impressum is lost. It is clear, however, that the printer was Peter van Selow (1582–1650). The only known copy belongs to the Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek in Weimar, where it functions as a kind of appendix to the Lutheran catechism, printed in Stockholm in 1628 by the same printer, Van Selow. Alphabetum Russarum was undoubtedly intended as an “international” counterpart to the well-known Swedish edition Alfabetum Rutenorum, although the former does not contain any texts from Luther’s catechism. Both tables appeared without a print date, but they were apparently issued in the late 1630s or the early 1640s. The unique Weimar copy of Alphabetum Russarum is also very special in another way: along with minor additions and corrections to the printed text it also contains a handwritten appendix in Latin, most likely written by Laurentius Rinhuber, the assistant to the first “Russian playwright” and author of the first court plays ever presented in Moscow (in the 1670s), the Lutheran pastor Johann Gottfried Gregorii.

The Gallophilia and Gallophobia of A.N. Ostrovskii, or Some considerations on the pragmatics of distinct identity: To the 200th anniversary of the birth of Corresponding Member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences A.N. Ostrovskii

What was the role of French literature and culture in the work of A.N. Ostrovskii, one of the most original, “soil” authors of the 19th centure? Why did contemporaries find a French trace in his most original dramas, and why did mastery of the French language (which he himself knew by no means perfectly) become one of the constant topics discussed by the characters of his dramas? These are the questions asked by the author of this article, dedicated to the anniversary of perhaps the most famous Russian playwright, who was a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences. The use of French words, Gallicisms, and macaronic language is analyzed by Ostrovskii from the point of view of the processes taking place in Russian culture from the mid-19th century, when it ceased to be a culture of bilingualism but was still actively and sometimes painfully experiencing, this time at the everyday level, its failed bilingualism. Along the way, in the context of Ostrovskii’s Gallophilia/Gallophobia, the question is raised about the specifics of the playwright’s attitude to the literary tradition and, in particular, to the tradition of N.V. Gogol.

Finding Eugene O’Neill in Maxim Gorki’s The Lower Depths

ABSTRACT In his early days as an author, Eugene O’Neill modeled himself on Maxim Gorki, even mimicking the Russian playwright when posing for an early portrait. Gorki’s 1902 play, Na dnie, had an immediate impact on European and American writers by demonstrating radical new ways a drama could speak to the modern world. O’Neill probably first encountered the play in its 1912 translation as The Lower Depths. In its many translations and productions Gorki’s play established for early twentieth-century theater artists a standard of integrity, though the play was also frequently misinterpreted. Near the end of his career, O’Neill utilized many elements of The Lower Depths in The Iceman Cometh, for reasons that have been debated. But Gorki’s play informs an interpretation of many other O’Neill plays, and the example of Gorki as a figure of modern artist resonated in the way O’Neill self-consciously fashioned himself as a modern artist.

Haunted Dreams: Fantasies of Adolescence in Post‐Soviet Culture By JennyKaminer. NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2022, xvi + 188 pp. $44.95. ISBN 978‐1‐5017‐6219‐2

Haunted Dreams: Fantasies of Adolescence in Post‐Soviet Culture By JennyKaminer. NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2022, xvi + 188 pp. $44.95. ISBN 978‐1‐5017‐6219‐2

Playing a tyrant – rethinking an autocrat in Asya Voloshina's Antigona: Redukciia

Written by Russian playwright Asya Voloshina, the 2013 Antigona : Redukciia is, as the author herself refers to it, 'a political satire with elements of poetry and reduction', which recasts Sophocles' title character, Antigone, from an existentialist tragic figure to a political rebel, whose actions of protest become inevitably and ironically performative in the highly mediatised culture of social media influencers and performative post-truth. A radical juxtaposition between the individual and the state, Voloshina's play exhibits deep internal connections with Bertolt Brecht's Die Antigone des Sophokles (1948), which serves as its contextual and analytical entry point. Like Brecht, I argue, Voloshina interprets the tragic conflict of Sophocles' Antigone as highly pragmatic. In her acknowledgement of Antigone's new reality – which simultaneously reminds of George Orwell's 1984 and Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games – Voloshina challenges the premise of the 20th century political tragedy. Her Antigone stands to combat the state-based machine of manipulation with her personal truth. She 'is motivated neither by religion nor by kinship'; for her Creon's law is 'simply a pretext to protest against her country turning into a totalitarian state' (SYSKA 2022: 4); and so eventually she is cancelled out from the history and from the myth. I conclude that Brecht's and Voloshina's plays connect the two centuries together, diagnose their respective dark times, and demonstrate that the cultures of populism produce corrupt moral standards, compromise personal dignity, and cultivate post-truth, all channeled through the role of an autocratic, if not tyrannic, state leader.

Дыхание Вселенной. Эпико-драматические структуры в русской драматургии ХIX века

This article is dedicated to the challenges of forming a unique type of epic-dramatic principle for structuring action in 19th century Russian drama and the issues of interaction between literary drama and the stage in the process of achieving the artistic identity of Russian theatre. The article analyzes the principles of non-plot and super-plot construction of action in the works of A. Griboedov, A. Pushkin, N. Gogol, I. Turgenev, A. Ostrovsky, A. Sukhovo-Kobylin, A.K. Tolstoy, L. Tolstoy, and A. Chekhov. It explores how Russian playwrights employ artistic means to present the narratives and conflicts within the encompassing spirituality of an overall worldview. The divergence — the aesthetic “fork” between literary drama and the common repertoire of the Russian stage in the 19th century, which becomes evident in the theatrical process, suggests that Russian drama is developing a principle of staginess — one that is able to express its inherent drama only with the advent of director's theatre.

고전 희곡 “바냐 삼촌”의 두 가지 형태의 리텔링 연구

This thesis is an attempt to convergely research retelling as text and retelling of class cases and apply it to the literary interpretation aspect and literature education methodology. In this thesis, two types of retelling were studied, targeting the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov's play “Uncle Vanya”. In Chapter 1, I studied literary writers' retelling of literary works through the play “Russian Jam” written by Ulitskaya in 2006, and in Chapter 2, I studied 'ACT', a liberal arts class at the university where I am teaching, the students studied Chekhov's play “Uncle Vanya” on the process and results. Through these two cases, a literary work can be interpreted in a wide variety of perspectives through retelling, and when applied to actual class cases, students can actively enjoy the class, breaking away from the one-sided lecturer- centered class. In particular, it is suggested that retelling in literature class can be actively used in literature class methodology because it contributes to students' various creativity, active reading.

The Proverb and its Function in Abdellah Mohia's Play “Menttif akka wala seddaw uẓekka”

AbstractUntil the nineteenth century, Kabyle literature was primarily oral, passed down through word of mouth and limited to various genres such as poetry, proverbs, riddles, tales, myths, and legends. The nineteenth century marked the beginning of the transition to writing in the Kabyle language through the transcription of oral literature. However, the true departure from orality occurred in the twentieth century with the emergence of an intellectual movement within the Kabyle community that started to write in Kabyle to develop it as a written language. These writers introduced new universal literary genres such as novels, short stories, and theater.The transition to writing in a language long confined to orality was not without its challenges. Writers often drew upon the rich oral expressions of the Kabyle language to overcome the difficulties of expressing new ideas, which became a hallmark of the writing of that era. Mohia Abdellah (1950-2004), faced the particular challenge of promoting his language by translating and adapting universal theater texts. Nevertheless, his translations and adaptations found great success by leveraging the Kabyle language's rich lexicon, especially its proverbs, which contributed to elevating the status of the Kabyle language as a written medium. This article examines some of these Kabyle proverbs reinvested by the dramatist Mohia Abdellah in his play titled “Menttif akka wala seddaw uẓekka” (literally, “better this than being in the grave”), an adaptation of the Russian playwright Nicolai Erdman's work “The Suicide.” Through an intertextual approach, the article highlights the significance of proverbial expressions in Kabyle writing due to their exceptional ability to convey complex ideas from another world. To achieve this, the article initially defines the traditional functions of Kabyle proverbs and subsequently compares them with their counterparts in the source text to better appreciate Mohia's efforts in translating and adapting foreign texts.

Sobol, T. and Sokolova, T., eds. (2021). Aleksandr Sukhovo-Kobylin: Materials from the collection at the State Literary Museum: An illustrated catalogue. Moscow: Literaturniy muzey. (In Russ.)

A. Sukhovo-Kobylin’s life and work are yet to be explored; to this day, no scholarly biography or complete collection of his works have been published. According to the authors of the illustrated catalogue that details the inventory of the State Literary Museum, once subjected to professional analysis, the listed museum objects and archival items may provide a reliable source of information about the celebrated Russian playwright. A genuine museum object possesses a unique power to verify researchers’ concepts. Sukhovo-Kobylin comes from a family rich in literary talent (Evgenia Tur, Evgeny Salias, and Evdokia Tur). Each of the writers had connections to a number of Russian literary doyens. These connections are traced and detailed in private correspondence and other equally exciting sources. Inconsistency of the material resulted in the catalogue’s division into several parts — each, however, emphasising Sukhovo-Kobylin’s role in the history of Russian literature.

Rethinking Chekhov's work in modern Chinese productions

This article is devoted to the consideration of a number of stage projects by Chinese directors, in which the work of the writer Anton Pavlovich Chekhov is reinterpreted. Analysis of such productions and projects as the international drama festival "Chekhov Forever" in 2004, a hybrid work based on Chekhov's story "Three Sisters" and Beckett's novel "Waiting for Godot" by Lin Zhaohua in 1998 and 2018, a double performance by Stan Lai based on the works "I take You by the Hand" by Carol Rocamora and "The Seagull" Chekhov 2014 , etc . It allows us to trace innovative approaches to reading Chekhov's works in the context of the life of modern Chinese society. These works cause a great resonance not only in the professional environment, but also among the mass audience, who invariably penetrates the depth of Chekhov's images, the subtlest shades of emotional experiences; the Chinese audience finds themselves close to the problems, hopes and aspirations of the heroes, brilliantly transferred to the actual socio-cultural environment of China, always topical and recognizable. The scientific novelty of the article is connected with the fact that the nature of mastering the creativity of the Russian playwright in the theater of the East is a fairly new and at the same time promising topic for research. The conclusions and results of the study can become the basis for further studies of the specifics of the adaptation of foreign dramaturgy in the national theatrical tradition on the example of other countries and regions.

Meaning construal through multimodal clusters in the theatrical discourse

The paper presents the results of an empirical study of monomodal and multimodal data collected from the plays by Russian playwrights of the second half of the 20th century (A. Vampilov, A. Kazantsev, N. Sadur) and the theatrical performances based on these plays. The main aim is to find out what semiotic modalities are more frequently involved in the process of recurrent semiosis and, as such, in the multimodal meaning construal. Following the classical as well as contemporary works in the field explored, the research sets out to elaborate the cognitive-semiotic approach to the analysis of the theatre-specific means of multimodal meaning construal to get insights into dynamicity, embodiment and figurativity of artistic expression typical of theatrical performativity and inaccessible to other arts. The data are explored by means of a complex methodology that comprises quantitative and qualitative methods with the diagraph analysis as a key analytical tool which serves to recognize meaningful correlations within and across modalities resulting from mappings between dialogically juxtaposed independent utterances. This paper demonstrates that the involvement of nonverbal resources is mainly manifested in the use of hand and head gestures, facial movements and body repositioning. Next to the quantitative results, the research shows that co-occurring conceptualizations through verbal and nonverbal components, gestures in particular, can trigger off the amplification of meaning or bring about the emergence of new conceptual projections.

Great Patriotic War in Modern Dramatic Discourse

The issue of understanding the theme of the Great Patriotic War (1941—1945) by modern Russian playwrights is raised in the article. The novelty of the study is due to the appeal to little-studied plays by the authors of the 21st century. The purpose of the article is to trace the specifics of the author’s individual variants of the artistic representation of the war theme on the material of the works of modern times and to give an idea of the discursive potential of this theme for modern dramaturgy. The evidence base is the analysis of three works written by different playwrights, which present the perception and living of military events and their consequences by a woman, a man and a child. These are the plays “Frontovichka” by A. Baturina, “Seven Trophies of Private Shapkin” by V. Tkachev and “Cannibal” by N. Vorobieva and K. Zhurenkov. The results of the analysis allow us to draw a parallel between eras and show that playwrights, through the prism of war, turn not so much to the past, but to the pressing problems of the present and future. It is concluded that this indicates the key nature of the military theme for modern Russian literature and its enduring significance both for each individual and for humanity as a whole.

Судьбы Гоголя и Пушкина в драматургической интерпретации А. Ремеза

The article analyzes two plays by Alexander Remez – a talented Russian playwright who at the turn of the 1970s – 1980s made an attempt of ‘dramatic studies’ of life and heritage of classical Russian writers of the 19th century.

Драмы Чехова как образная основа пьес «Любовь в Крыму» Славомира Мрожека и «Уход» Вацлава Гавела

The play by Slavomir Mrozhek “Love in Crimea” (1993) and Vaclav Havel's “Leaving” (2007) are based on themes and images of the plays by A. P. Chekhov. Slavic playwrights portray Chekhov's style, fill their plays with direct quotes, reminiscences, and allusions from his plays. This paper traces the connections between “Love in Crimea” by Mrozhek and “Leaving” by Havel with Chekhov's plays “The Seagull”, “Uncle Vanya”, “Three Sisters” and “The Cherry Orchard”. “Three Sisters” and “The Cherry Orchard” by Chekhov became the basis for the creation of Mrozhek's play “Love in the Crimea”. In the first act of the play (1910) the atmosphere of Chekhov's drama, some Chekhov's heroes, the style of the Russian playwright are recreated, and in the last act (1990s) Chekhov's images are transformed and testify to the destruction of Russian life and culture. In the play “Leaving” Vaclav Havel relies mainly on the images and symbols of Chekhov's “The Cherry Orchard", transferred to the 21st century and politically shaped to fit the new realities. The image of time will turn out to be the key: Mrozhek and Havel address the Chekhov's drama to show the connection between times, to reflect in a historical perspective the conflict between the moral and therefore the lonely person and the pragmatic world.