A “Pitch-Dark” Character in a “Pitch-Dark” World of Russian Postmodern Drama

The focus of the artistic analysis is on the poetics of the “new new drama” - a phenomenon of Russian literary postmodern and an emerging form-content unity that is the most aesthetically flexible and experimentally audacious in transgression of genre borders, sense and structure elements and, in the first place, axiological grounds and metaphysical principles. Plays by modern authors (E. Gremina, I. Vyrypayev, V. Sigarev, Yu. Klavdiev, V. Kalitvyanskiy, S. Kirov, the brothers Presnyakov, and others) reveal the dominating intentionality: a pursuit to find a genre form that provides reflection of the post-perestroika cultural-social reality, peculiarities of the consciousness and spiritual life of contemporaries, people of an essentially new formation whose motivation turned out to be beyond the traditional ideas of the good and the evil dichotomy. The above-mentioned predetermines the topicality and novelty of the study. The text analysis of the plays The Sakhalin Wife by E. Gremina, The Carter by V. Kalitvyanskiy, A Sanitary Standard by S. Kirov, July by I. Vyripayev, Plasticine by V. Sigarev, Bullet Collector by Yu. Klavdiev, Europe-Asia, Pub, Bad Bed Stories by the brothers Presnyakov proves that the reality the playwrights depict and its hero-inmate dwell in a nightmare and antiworld paradigm: a desemanticized conglomerate of objects symbolizing the consumer society in a grotesque way; the only meaningful constituents of this society are violence and death. The aesthetic pillars, typical features and basic semes of the “pitch-dark world” are as follows: life as a hollow form or a simulated being; depressive space and time; an irretrievable loss of the “object of love”; absolutization of death, as a value category as well; antihero or trickster who is beyond traditional views on spirituality, morality and virtue. The variations of characters range from madmancannibals to ordinary family tyrants; a special type is a child as an antonym to the archetype of a pure and sinless infant. Complete destruction gives the subject/object of the “pitch-dark world” a chance to regain the lost meanings of existence; things and phenomena can reclaim authenticity (it appears to be symbolic when teenage characters acquire childhood attributes only in a metaphysical other-worldly space). The death actualized in character's consciousness both as an existential fear-nightmare and an existential way out destroys the viciousness, purposelessness and boredom of the simulated life-inversion. The “pitch-dark world” of modern drama still preserves ambivalent meanings typical of this cultural archetype (defined in works by M. Bakhtin, D. Likhachev, A. Panchenko, N. Ponyrko, Yu. Mann): absolute death does not eliminate the hope for revival and the miracle of redemption, rectification of the ill fate, while total destruction and negation are connected with the pursuit of new life guidelines.

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