Synthesis of genres in the drama trilogy Scenes of the Past by A.V. Sukhovo-Kobylin

The dramatic, the melodramatic, the comedian, and the pamphletic can be seen in all parts of the trilogy, but manifest themselves most clearly in Delo [The Case], the second play in the trilogy. The choice and recognition of the genre become an aesthetic problem for both the author and the audience. Discrepancies and genre inconsistencies smoothed by vigorous rhetoric are the key structural principle of the trilogy. The pool of characters turns into a full-blown accusatory remark, a showdown and a sentence to all who were guilty before Sukhovo-Kobylin. The trilogy itself is a rigorous statement of historical and personal circumstances and the freak of fate that broke his life once and forever. The inter-play continuity of the trilogy is provided by temporal indicators ("six years later") and the balance between old and new characters. The guises familiar to the audience undergo transformations, sprouting the seeds of tragedy and tragifarce seen in the first play. The signs of a total disaster piling up in the second part turn out to be a jeering anecdote, a lampoon, a mockery of life and death, and an alternate substitution of a dead man for a living one and vice versa. No wonder Kartiny proshedshego [Scenes from the Past] was perceived as a farce at the beginning of the 20th century. Today, identification of various genres in each play of the trilogy as well as in the whole dramatic cycle, requires a wider range of sources. The choice of a specific genre always has to do with Suk-hovo-Kobylin's ideological position. He sees himself as a participant of and witness to the painful processes going on in Russia. The author's development of the genre conception and its philosophical underpinning have not yet been addressed by researchers in this context. Whatever it was he was writing about, Sukhovo-Kobylin always returned to the same speculation about the criminality of the apparatus of the Russian government and the criminal world order. This firm belief was realized in two interrelated forms, two major genres in which he polished his ideas: dramatic trilogy Scenes from the Past and philosophical tractate Uchenie Vsemir [The All-World Doctrine]. It is not so much synthesis as syncretism of genres in Scenes from the Past that we can talk of in the context of regular mental exercises, diary confessions and epistolary documents reflected in comedies Svad'ba Krechinskogo [Krechinsky's Wedding] and Smert' Tarelkina [Tarelkin's Death]. This syncretism is what makes Sukhovo-Kobylin's theater so holistic and his theories so persistently and vividly embodied.

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