The traditions of commedia dell'arte in Alexander Blok's LYRIC AND DRAMA ("Verses about the Beautiful Lady" -"The Fairground Booth" - "Mask of snow")

Silver Age of Russian poetry is the epoch of short but outstanding golden age of Russian theatre culture, the epoch of small theatres and art cafe such as "Prival Komediantov" and "The Stray Dog Cafe", time of theatre magazines, and the stagings reviving the images of carnival folk culture of European Middle Ages and their literary adaptations as fiabas by Gozzi in the wild and catastrophic atmosphere of Russian in the first decade of 20th century. The main aesthetic event of the age - Alexander Blok's drama - is considered to be the first ever Russian professional theatre experience of the methods and masks of commedia dell'arte. In origins, Blok's drama goes back not so much to the theatre as to the lyric tradition. Blok's symbolist drama arises from his lyric as the explication of the potential lyric tesion into the stable original form. This is for a reason that Blok determines the genre specification of his drama texts with the expression "lyric drama". This is why Blok's drama, having grown from the lyrics to the independent being, returns to verses as a result, releasing their immanently inherent drama potential. In the cirular motion of lyric-drama forms and sences of Blok's creative heritage, the crucial importance is indeed in images, characters, and cultural-historical sences of commedia dell'arte, which was a kind of double symbol for the poet. Glaring staginess, improvisationness and momentary topicality, rash action and optimism of commedia dell'arte in the associative field of Blok's artictic mentality were making it some kind of equivalent meaning of the concept "theatre" in general. Since, for Blok, theatre was a locus where art meets life, commedia dell'arte was corresponding to the life conception in his consciousness. Harlequinade starts with the first-ever literary work by Blok - the series-collection "Verses About the Beautiful Lady" (1901-1902). The dou-bleness of lyrical subject of the series has a tendency to the formalization of the inner lyrical dialogism fraught with the owerflow of a dialogized lyrical text to an explicised drama dialogue; future thematical melodies of the lyric drama "The Fairground Booth" begin to sound. Blok's lyric-symbolic drama has no psychologism - it is replaced with symbolic images of either the characters of medieval legends (a knight and his lady) or the masks of commedia dell'arte (Harlequine, Pierrot, Colom-bina, Buffon), or, finally, funclional-characterological pseudo-anthroponyms (Mystics, Author, Lovers, He and She), the characterologi-cal filling of which is as static and definite as the character of a mask of commedia dell'arte. "The Fairground Booth" has the implementation of every general constructive pecularity of commedia dell'arte: Blok reproduces the basics of the genre with rare entirety and effectiveness: improvi-sationness of a plot, actors' buffoonery, and burlesque comicatily; comic multilingualism (the use of dialects in commedia dell'arte), which gets the form of multistylishness in "The Fairground Booth"; dualization and reflectivity as the universal constructive basics of the anti-illusionistic image of reality, which ones commedia dell'arte creates in its eternal plots-scenarios. In the verses of the series "Snow", lyrical series "Mask of Snow" (1907) reveals the motives actual for Blok's interpretation of Harlequine image: the motives of circle, vortex movement-whirling, run, and flight, and also the general situation of the Harlequine's chase after teasing fleeing Colombine. However, now they obtain the localization in the metaphysical area of life: this is a fairy tale and a dream, this is not like life at all. While commedia dell'arte could - and it still can - dispute with life as its equivalent, its historical spectactor, who are gone to the past forever, are able only to live ghostly as unclear visions of a poet's imagination; however, commedia dell'arte left an indelible mark of its all-triumphant laugh and indestructible optimism on this past. These exact merits would henceforth reside in the most seemingly pessimistic Blok's works; dialectics of drama and lyric poetry would produce the lyric-epic poem genre - the most appropriate to Blok's creative identity. It would gain its culmination incarnation in the poem "The Twelve", where the traditions of commedia dell'arte would find its expression as well: in the travelogical Harlequinade of Petrucha and Katka on the background of the all-sweeping and all-blowing blizzard - the symbol of invincible human passion and unstoppable cataclysm of history.

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