Categories of hero and character in drama in the light of historical poetics (in the non-classical period of the epoch of modality)

Krasnikov Yaroslav Evgen'yevich ORCID: 0009-0002-8188-6845 Senior Lecturer, Department of Theoretical and Historical Poetics, Russian State University for the Humanities; Senior Lecturer, Department of Humanity Disciplines, Institute of Theatre Art named after People's Artist of USSR I.D. Kobzon 141446, Russia, Moscow, Miusskaya Ploshchad str., 6 yar-krasnikov@yandex.ru Other publications by this author

Introduction

An important quality of the literary practice of the era of poetic modality is the reorientation of aesthetic dominants: the vector focused on the category of genre in the preceding global period of historical poetics (the era of eidetic poetics) is redirected towards the subjective sphere of the text. The objects of the authors' emphasized attention and the special receptive interest of the readers of the epoch are the heroes and characters of literary texts. This is also the case in the dramatic kind of literature – the actors of the plays are in focus.

            The categories of hero and character often become subjects of literary research, but the vast majority of works on this topic are associated with an analytical examination of texts of epic literature (novels, novellas, fairy tales, etc.). Drama texts are somewhat deprived in this sense. At the same time, it cannot be said that scientific literature devoted to this problem is absent in Russian philology at all. The works known to us focus on the consideration of dramatic types, character systems, the place of heroes and characters in the artistic world of plays and at the same time are written mainly in a historical and literary way, that is, they consider the works of playwrights of a particular decade, century or plays belonging to a particular literary trend. As a rule, the question of the specifics of heroes and characters is reviewed in the scientific and educational literature in rather concise sections or very briefly and, as they say, in passing (for example, in a collective work on the latest domestic dramaturgy edited by T. V. Zhurcheva ^[16]; in L. N. Tatarinova's monograph "The History of Foreign Literature of the late XIX – the beginning of the XX century" ^[19]; in the chapter on Western European dramaturgy in the textbook on the history of foreign literature of the XX century of Moscow State University, written by P. Y. Rybina ^[18]).

Russian Russian drama Among the most significant studies on this subject it is worth noting: L. G. Tyutelova's doctoral dissertation on the poetics of the subject sphere of the Russian drama of the XIX century (which touches on material from the dramaturgy of Romantics to the dramaturgy of A. P. Chekhov) ^[20], candidate dissertations of T. N. Denisova, whose work is devoted to the concept of the hero in the Russian dramaturgy of the 2nd half of the XX V. A. Lukov's articles on "ideal heroes" in the European drama of the XIX century ^[14] and S. M. Kozlova on the essence of "impersonal heroes" of modern drama ^[8], and O. Y. Bagdasaryan on the drama "postvampilovtsev", where a special place is given to the analysis of the speech activity of heroes and characters ^[1]; V. A. Lukov's articles on "ideal heroes" in the European drama of the XIX century ^[14] and S. M. Kozlova on the essence of "impersonal heroes" of modern drama ^[8], as well as the "Experimental Dictionary of Modern Drama" edited by Professor S. P. Lavlinsky of the Russian State University ^[23], where most dictionary entries from different angles touch upon the categories of hero and character in the artistic world of drama (some of which were previously published in authoritative periodicals ^[12],[5], etc.). Thus, an urgent problem at the moment is the presence of a relatively small number of studies on this topic in Russian philology, in particular, the lack of works considering heroes and characters in drama in the light of historical poetics.

The main purpose of our research is to trace the historical specifics of the poetological categories of the hero and the character in the dramaturgical works of the non–classical period of the era of poetic modality. To achieve this goal, within the framework of this scientific article, the following tasks will have to be solved step by step: to describe the specifics of understanding and depicting the phenomenon of personality in the dramaturgy of the selected period; to identify innovative types of heroes and characters appearing in the works of the era; to identify the forms of the presence of subjects in the text that were borrowed from previous periods of historical poetics; to characterize the innovation of playwrights of the non-classical period epochs of modality at the level of creating images and using motives; and, finally, to attract the most appropriate examples of dramaturgical works reflecting the characteristics of the categories of the hero and character of the chosen epoch.

The material of this study is the most representative texts of domestic and foreign dramaturgy of the mid–XIX - early XXI centuries (including plays by A. P. Chekhov and his European contemporaries, symbolist M. Maeterlinck, representative of the Oberiutov A. Vvedensky, the absurdist S. Beckett, the Soviet playwright A. Vampilov, the postmodernist V. Yerofeyev, the authors of the national "new drama", as well as our contemporaries A. Strogonov, D. Danilov and many others).

Understanding and portraying personality in the Era of Modality

The interest in the inner world of heroes and characters inherent in the whole epoch of poetic modality generates a new unit in the poetics of the subjective sphere of the literary text – "image-personality" (along with the previously formed "image-type" and "image-character"). As S. N. Broitman notes, "at the dawn of the poetics of artistic modality, literature faced the task of depicting personality, not character" ^{[2, p. 266]}. Thus, the new type of artistic imagery that appeared turned out to be a kind of revolutionary discovery. The image-personality crystallized in the bosom of verbal creativity was a logical consequence of the search for romantics in literature, the emergence and development of an individualistic type of consciousness, as well as the spread of egocentric behavior in life, and then, decades later, theoretically revealed as a result of the achievements of psychological science, the development of the method of psychoanalysis and its expansion into the broad fields of the humanities.

In the non-classical period of the era of poetic modality, a close interest in the phenomenon of personality collides with the understanding that a person is actually far from the perfection that distinguished the semi-legendary heroes of ancient tragedies, prominent historical figures in the drama of classicism and many other actors of plays of previous eras. From century to century, the hero of the drama goes from an outstanding and unique figure to a gradual approach to ordinary people, and, as the researcher of the theater P. Pavi notes, "the history of literature is a series of successive declassification of the hero" ^{[17, p. 53]}.

The deepening of the authors of the era of poetic modality in the question of comprehending the "I" of the hero leads to the realization that even in literature as an activity for constructing an aesthetically completed reality, absolute integrity and integrity of character are unattainable. It is impossible to always unconditionally correspond to the social roles occupied in society (which, as it turns out, a person has a lot) and, in this regard, the demands of others about them.

The subject of interest of European playwrights of the late XIX – early XX centuries is the "tragedy of everyday life" ^{[6, p. 19]}, caused by the discrepancy between the ideal idea of oneself and the social roles performed in society. The unsettled, imperfect characters are more or less clearly demonstrated in the texts of playwrights of the turn of the century: A. P. Chekhov, G. Ibsen, A. Strindberg, M. Maeterlinck, B. Shaw, G. Hauptman... As theater critic B. I. Zingerman wittily emphasizes, "if in the old theater it was said about the tragedy in life, then in the new one – about the tragedy of life" ^{[6, p. 19]}. The main innovation of the dramaturgy of this period is the introduction of the compositional form of the dispute into the text canvas of the drama. "Now," as I. O. Shaitanov notes, "a discussion takes the place of the denouement, during which the characters should not sort things out, but understand themselves" ^{[22, p. 10]}.

The main emphasis in the play is transferred from the active actions and pronounced external event conflict of the heroes and characters to their reflection, emotional experiences, respectively, internal conflict, which is primarily associated with contradictions within the personality. As the researchers note, in the dramaturgy of the turn of the century, "the characters are usually not arranged as before, not "against each other", <...> their actions are deprived of their former certainty <...> and, accordingly, do not always cause a proper – opposite–directed reaction from other actors" ^{[6, p. 11]}.

For example, the key action of the main plays of A. P. Chekhov ("The Seagull", "Uncle Vanya", "Three Sisters", "Cherry Orchard") is mainly not in the agonistic confrontation of the actors, but in their self-reflection. Communication of characters with each other in Chekhov's drama often turns into the so-called "dialogue of the deaf", where each speaker is closed to himself, so immersed in his own inner world and personal problems that he hardly hears the interlocutor. As the literary critic Yu. V. Domansky rightly notes, such "dialogues turn out to be essentially monologue-like" ^{[4, p. 68]}. The locomotives of the plot development in A. P. Chekhov's mature dramaturgy are monologues of key actors, within which there may be a repeated change of the hero's points of view on his current situation and those around him, rethinking plans for the future, as well as a reassessment of the past (for example, Nina Zarechnaya's monologue from the fourth act of "The Seagull"). In one of the previous works, we noted the special importance of the narrative type of discourse in the play "The Seagull", which allows the playwright in the form of "stage narratives" to explicate the attitude of heroes and characters to the pages of his own biography, significant events, incidents, stories from the past ^[9].

The open struggle on the stage of the protagonists and antagonists remains in the past (in the dramaturgy of the era of eidetic poetics and the classical period of the era of poetic modality) or outside the limits of high literature, preserved, for example, in the genre of "well–made play" popular on the European stage in the mid-XIX - early XX centuries. Sometimes this tradition of a kind of mass literature becomes an occasion for ridicule and parody, for example: "Chekhov ridicules traditional theatrical passions and the traditional struggle of personal interests in his vaudevilles" ^{[6, p. 13]}.

In the non-classical period of the era of poetic modality, subjects experiencing an "identity crisis" ^[21] appear under the microscope of the dramatic view, that is, heroes and characters who feel internal discord, the discrepancy between what is desired and what is real in their lives, which often develops into a key conflict of the play. So, for example, Zilov from A. Vampilov's play "Duck Hunt" is going through a midlife crisis, cannot and does not want to match the roles of an ordinary engineer in an ordinary bureau; an outwardly "respectable" husband who, like some others, has a mistress; a companion for uninteresting "friends" to him, etc. However, as the researcher of dramaturgy N. I. Ishchuk-Fadeeva notes, "this artificial atmosphere is natural for Zilov, who has lost the idea of true human values" ^[7]. The deep internal crisis of the hero eventually materializes into a funeral staged by his friends, and Zilov himself is actually awarded the "status of a "living corpse"" ^[7].

The fundamental moment of the poetics of the drama of the era of poetic modality is the departure from the type of "ready-made hero", the characters of new plays are often characterized by unpredictability of behavior. This reflects, on the one hand, the author's attitude that any personality is irreducible to its external manifestations and, moreover, to social roles capable of programming behavior. On the other hand, an unexpected and sudden change in behavior can be a spontaneous decision for the actor himself and, therefore, is a marker of a self-seeking personality "groping" for a strategy of interaction with other people. This kind of outwardly eccentric behavior of the heroes of the drama of the era in question can be a manifestation (as if "splashing out" to the surface) of an identity crisis rooted in the depths of the personality, which is often expressed in illogicality, thoughtlessness of behavior, a desire to attract the attention of interlocutors in a shocking or shocking way.

Very shocking, for example, is the heroine of A. Strogonov's play "Ornithology" Tatiana, who puts on a chicken costume at the hottest moment of a discussion with a character named Kind, and then decides to stay in a negligee at all. Speaking about this kind of behavior of actors, B. I. Zingerman notes that "upon closer examination, it turns out that their eccentric actions are rigidly determined by the position they occupy in society" ^{[6, p. 18]}. The modern world, I must say, dulls and erases some reactions and emotions. In the case of the mentioned heroine, we can say that she decides to take on the role of a kind of psychoanalyst (which is very close to the real profession of the author of the play), trying to arouse interest in life and curiosity from the Kind Person lured to visit her, at the same time trying to understand herself.

New social types and the search for original heroes

The palette of heroes and characters of the drama of the non-classical stage of the era of poetic modality is replenished with new faces, an important point in the characterization of which is their social affiliation. On the one hand, it can be perceived as a natural reaction of literature to changing life. Among the historical and literary types in the drama of the non-classical period appear as representatives of a new class of the bourgeoisie, as the "Napoleon of industry" Boss Mangen (in the "House where Hearts are Broken" by B. Shaw), bureaucrats and Soviet nomenclature (for example, in the "Bath" by V. Mayakovsky), steelworkers, concrete workers, gas welders from the Soviet "production dramas", officials and civil servants in the plays of A. Gelman, office clerks and managers (as in "The Grenholm Method" by J. Galseran), etc.; and the social lower classes that had previously remained in the shadow of the artistic image: starting from a rather innocent flower girl from London's Soho quarter (in "Pygmalion" by J. B. Shaw), where is Professor of phonetics Higgins opposed to her in terms of social origin and education, the declassified inhabitants of Kostylev's flophouse (in M. Gorky's "At the Bottom") or those who got mad and mired like predators with their "claws" in the sin of Nikita's peasants and his mother Matryona (in L. Tolstoy's "Power of Darkness") to outright bandits and marginals from texts of the domestic "new drama" of the late XX – early XXI centuries ^{[23, pp. 152-159]}.

On the other hand, such socially marked characters can be a significant symptom of the bias of literature in general and dramatic works for the theater in particular. During periods of acute ideological confrontation on the world stage and in the internal borders of individual countries, dramaturgy becomes a way of influencing the minds of the audience masses. In many ways, the aesthetic attitudes and strategies of the so-called "epic theater" of B. Brecht were connected with this idea. Summarizing his theoretical reflections, literary critic P. Y. Rybina summarizes the position of the playwright: "The audience is called not to enjoy illusory joys or sufferings, but through the performance to determine their personal attitude to current events of public and political life" ^{[18, p. 370]}. This attitude was important for followers of the Brecht method, representatives of the European documentary theater, socialist realist plays and even individual works of the latest domestic drama (especially those related to the Verbatim genre).

The creative search of playwrights of the era of poetic modality is often realized in the original choice of the hero. The plays of the symbolist school bring to the stage beings, things, even products that are not endowed with a soul and consciousness in the usual reality. In part, this is comparable to the allegorical figures of medieval drama, but in the plays of modern times, such heroes do not just personify the forces of nature or forces affecting a person (like the ancient gods), they behave like people, with a degree of unpredictability in behavior, fears, doubts, etc. At the same time, such actors sometimes allow to catch the hidden author's intentions on an intuitive level. As L. N. Tatarinova notes, for the symbolist M. Maeterlinck, "cognition has nothing to do with intelligence, it is intuitive and spontaneous, it is connected with foresight, premonition, comprehension of Fate" ^{[19, p. 16]}. So, in his famous play "The Blue Bird" (which A. Blok in his notes strongly recommended calling blue, not blue, after all, since this epithet in the Russian tradition is associated with the artistic images of romantics and their followers ^{[19, pp. 32-33]}) there is a scene where in front of the young heroes Bread turns from an inanimate object into a full-fledged actor, and the unfolding dialogue demonstrates that he, it turns out, is also endowed with some ability to reflect.  In addition to the aforementioned Bread, the system of characters of the "Blue Bird" also consists of: Runny Nose, Fire, Water, Milk, Sugar, Dog and Cat, Clock Souls, Light Soul, Spirits of Cypress, Lime, Chestnut and some other dumb objects and creatures in ordinary life.

Among such actors appearing in the latest domestic and foreign dramaturgy, who unexpectedly for readers and viewers, and perhaps even for themselves, begin to reflect on philosophical topics and ask existential questions, one can include, for example, Penguins talking about God (from "At the Ark at Eight" by W. Hub), A reflecting larva (from the "Swamp" by M. Krapivina), etc.

Subjective neosyncretism and choral word

It is worth noting that the mixing of heterogeneous elements, polar characteristics, be it genre principles of comedy and tragedy, various lexical layers, contrasting character traits of heroes and characters, etc., is one of the productive ways of developing the poetics of artistic texts of the era of poetic modality. In the works of the non-classical period of the epoch, as P. Pavi notes, "a person is systematically dismantled <...>, reduced to the state of an individual, stuffed with contradictions and integrated into history, which defines him more than he suspects about it" ^{[17, p. 11]}.

Taking into account the evolutionary achievements of previous epochs at the level of the subjective structure, the drama of the non-classical period of the era of poetic modality resorts to the so-called "subjective neosyncretism" ^[15] as a way of "artistic" research of the "crisis of self-consciousness of modern man" ^{[12, p. 120]}. In some cases, this may manifest itself as a kind of splitting of the subject into separate voices naming different sides of his character, hypostasis (as, for example, in V. Sorokin's play "Hochzeitsreise", the heroine "on occasion is divided into Masha-1 and Masha-2"). In most texts, subjective neosyncretism manifests itself in the form of merging different voices into one. An interesting example of the merger of two subjects is Y. Klavdiev's monodrama "I, the machine gunner", where the hero speaks immediately on behalf of a modern young man and on behalf of a grandfather who passed the war. As noted by S. P. Lavlinsky, a specialist in modern Russian dramaturgy: "The transition from one voice to another in [this – Ya. K.] text is almost not marked – the author intentionally "merges" them into a convulsive speech stream" ^{[11, p. 61]}. Or, for example, the question of the border of the author, the hero and the remarque subject in the monodramas of E. Grishkovets ("How I ate a dog", "Dreadnoughts", etc.) also remains open.

Turning to archaic forms of organization of the subject structure, the authors of the drama of the epoch of modality can introduce structures into the texts of their works that resemble the speeches of the ancient choir (which appeared at the end of the syncretism era as a symptom of the isolation of the individual principle and differentiation of the author and heroes). Thus, F. G. Lorca introduces into the text canvas of his play "The Bloody Wedding" "three woodcutters appearing in the 1st picture of Act III to the sounds of violins and playing the role of an ancient choir" ^{[18, p. 368]}. In Russian dramaturgy, a similar technique can be found in A. Vvedensky's play "The Ivanovs' Christmas Tree", where characters collectively referred to as children literally (as noted in the remarks) pronounce their lines in chorus.

"Image-silhouette" and the impersonality of the hero

In later texts of the drama of the era of poetic modality, heroes and characters of a special type appear, who are not personalities with internal crisis and the ability to self-reflection. These are individuals who show extremely little or no ability to introspect, do not differ in persistent internal value beliefs, obvious behavioral and plot initiative. As P. Pavi notes, "the modern hero can no longer influence events, he has no position on reality" ^{[17, p. 53]}. Such actors "go with the flow", and the motivations of their behavior are more or less basic biological needs. It seems appropriate to us, continuing the classification of types of images proposed in the concept of historical poetics by S. N. Broitman ^[2] ("image-type", "image-character" and "image-personality") to call such an actor an "image-silhouette". Such figures are not characters insufficiently prescribed by the author, as, for example, minor characters in Moliere's comedies, whose main line of behavior is determined by belonging to a social type (image–type) or a special temperament, which is guided by dominant passions (image-character). They are also not oniric characters, like, for example, invisible phantoms in the play by E. Ionesco "Chairs" or invisible to the viewer "sounds of footsteps in an empty room" from the play by Yu. O'Neill's "The Long Day goes into the Night." The silhouette image is an actor brought by the playwright to the extreme in its aimlessness, characterized by the absence of internal value attitudes, in its limit being a biological individual without pronounced psychological personal uniqueness.

Visually, such images-silhouettes appeared in the works of the so-called theater of the absurd. "Absurdists play the situation of a family dinner, expectation, meeting, communication of two people in such a way that the characters of their plays acquire the properties of individuals without individualities – a kind of walking caricature, which at the same time contains something indelibly human, at the same time funny and sad" ^{[18, p. 381]}. For example, the interlocutors from the "Bald Singer" by E. Ionesco or the couple Vladimir (Didi) and Estragon (Gogo) from S. Beckett's play "Waiting for Godot". Examples in the domestic drama can be the newlyweds The Bride and Groom from O. Bogaev's play "Dawn-Way", apple collectors from P. Pryazhko's "Harvest", a couple of young people meeting and starting to live together from V. Levanov's play "Closet".

The title character of D. Danilov's play "The Man from Podolsk" should also be attributed to this series of silhouette images. The conciseness and shallowness of the answers in the self-presentation of a Person from Podolsk speaks about the properties of his mental activity and, most importantly, value life attitudes, demonstrates the "restriction of his view" (as we have already written in detail ^[10]). Although, it should be noted, this is far from the least reflective hero in the texts of the drama of recent decades, especially since in the process of this absurd interrogation he begins to rethink a lot.

It is also important that the name of a Person from Podolsk, as well as a number of other silhouette images, is given in an unnamed and thus impersonal form. Such deprivation of the actors of the name can be perceived in two aspects. On the one hand, in this case, "man appears here as a generic concept: a defenseless being before the forces of nature and the future" ^{[19, p. 18]} (like the heroes of M. Maeterlinck's "Blind" or the First Man in L. Andreev's play "Human Life"). On the other hand, nameless heroes can often be found in the domestic "new drama" (for example, He and She in V. Levanov's play "The Closet"), where the name of the heroes according to their social role or even reduction to a pronoun can be read (along with the above interpretation) as the inner emptiness and non-fullness of the characters marked by the author, i.e. silhouette.

Marginality and escapism

A noticeable trend in the construction of character systems of plays of the non-classical period of the era of poetic modality is the appeal to the marginal layers of modern society. In the Russian tradition, M. Gorky was the first to bring such heroes to the stage in the play "At the Bottom", which literally turned the literary and theatrical world of his day (like the revolutionary decision of A. N. Ostrovsky to bring the merchant class to the stage).

The appeal to heroes and characters of this kind is very popular nowadays and is realized in plays written in line with the so-called "documentary drama" and "hypernaturalism" (or in the terminology of M. Lipovetsky "chernukhi" ^[13]). According to O. V. Dreifeld, in modern art there is a noticeable interest "in depicting the physiologized or socially disadvantaged sides of the "bottom of life", as well as taboo subjects in the relationships of representatives of different strata of society as the only available kind of reality of a modern person" ^{[5, p. 109]}. In foreign drama, the trend manifests itself – from the depiction of the thieves' world of B. Brecht's "Threepenny Opera" to the heroes of M. McDonagh's plays "The Orphan West", "The Cripple from Inishman Island", depicting physically disabled or mentally crippled actors. In Russian dramaturgy, examples of such artistic texts can be attributed to N. Kolyada's "Slingshot", V. Sigarev's "Plasticine", etc.

The reaction to the inexorable pace of life in the modern world is the desire to escape from everyone and from oneself, expressed in the text in the so-called escape motive. From the rather innocent attempts of the hero-dreamer nicknamed the Cockerel to escape to the countryside and become "colonists" in the art world of V. Slavkin's "Serso" to ways to escape from reality associated with a pernicious craving for alcohol or intoxicating substances: many heroes and characters of A. Slavkin's plays. Vampilov, "Tram "Desire" by T. Williams, "Dostoevsky-Trip" by V. Sorokin, etc.

A significant trend in modern dramaturgy is the "striving for naturalistic life-likeness" ^{[18, p. 358]}. A frequent reaction to the cruel world, a peculiar form of expression of helplessness is aggression, physical ("theater of cruelty" by A. Artaud and his followers) or verbal (sometimes reaching verbal violence). It is worth noting that obscene and obscene vocabulary was fixed in the poetics of the domestic "new drama" of the turn of the XX – XXI centuries as one of the characteristic elements of the speech of heroes and characters. However, it looks very artfully and wittily in the speech of the actors of "Walpurgis Night, or the Steps of the Commander" by V. Yerofeyev, for many of whom the word becomes almost the only available form of protection.

Conclusion

Summing up, first of all, it is worth noting that the most important moment for this period of historical poetics is the awareness of the complexity and inconsistency of human nature, which results in the interest of playwrights in depicting the crisis moments of personality and self-reflection.

Of course, it is difficult to reduce the diverse ways of development of the category of hero and character in the drama of the era of poetic modality to a single denominator, but it is possible to identify the dominant trends. So, along with the strategy of isolating and emphasizing the uniqueness of the personality ("image-personality"), there is a strategy of erasing the individual features of the actors ("image-silhouette"). New social realities that are reflected in the original types become significant. Very frequent characteristics of the actors of the era, as it was emphasized in the work, are manifested features of marginality and motives of escapism.

In addition to the special types of imagery noted above, unique to the subjective sphere of the third global period of historical poetics, the drama of the non-classical period of the epoch of modality also absorbs and actively applies such achievements of previous epochs (the era of syncretism and the era of eidetic poetics) as the phenomenon of neosyncretism, choral word, transforming them in their own way in artistic texts.