drama

The article proposes a new version of the cycle-forming organization of “Little Tragedies” by A. S. Pushkin, after a brief excursion through the already existing cycle-forming concepts of a group of scenes and plays united in Russian culture under the non-author’s general name “Little Tragedies”. The intra-textual situation of unexpected, spontaneous inspiration of the central characters of the plays included in the cycle is put forward as a binding compositional element.

The paper examines the creative history of the play Psisha by Yuri Belyaev – a theatre critic, fi ction writer and dramatist of the Silver Age. While working on the article cycle A night at “The Opera House” about theatre history of the times of Catherine II, the critic researched historical sources: periodical, fi ction, documents of the second half of the 18th – early 19th centuries. There Belyaev must have found the material for his early fi ctional experience – the historical short story Psisha.

The article discusses a particular type of fragments in the montage composition of Sasha Sokolov’s novel A School for Fools in terms of its structural and semantic specificity, substantiates the principles of the possibility of highlighting it in the text and also reveals a special nature of the montage junction in the novel.

The article first collected and systematized organically included in the artistic fabric of the Rolland dramatic epic antique images and comparisons that contributed to the reconstruction of the features of the historical color of the image of the French Revolution of 1789.

The article is dedicated to “Theatre de la Revolution” of R. Rolland – a cycle of plays about the French revolution of 1789, which is viewed in the aspect of the problem of the synthesis of the arts (in this case – the literary and musical arts). As a result of the analysis of «Theatre de la Revolution» poetics compared to the symphonic quality of Beethoven (who Rolland was guided by), the naturalness and the reasonableness of Rolland’s including the musical symphonic element in his dramaturgic cycle is proved.

In the process of studying drama, direct contacts between characters outlined by the author deserve special attention. Such contacts help to clearly identify the characters’ dispositions, the nature of their relationship, features of the mise-en-scène pattern. The article focuses on the role of such contact motives in A. P. Chekhov’s comedy The Seagull.

The article regards the correlation of two approaches of A. P. Skaftymov to the interpretation of A. P. Chekhov’s plays – the historic and the existential; the «polyglottism» of the scientist’s works is researched; the link of his ideas with the emergent existential philosophy is revealed.

The author of the article singles out the main problem of Bulgakov’s tragedy which is a distinctive feature of his plays as well as of epic compositions and of his personal world-view. The author claims that the main profound conflict in Bulgakov’s works turns to be the collision of fortune and fate generally presented in the world literature from Ancient Greeks to our days. The researcher emphasizes some special traits of Bulgakov’s stories of 1930s such as deceptiveness of fortune, prediction of the denouement in action.