The Genre-Forming Function of the “Tragic-Grotesque” Perception of Reality in Mikhail Bulgakov's Plays

The aim of the research, which determines the relevance and novelty of the work, is the analysis of the genre specificity of Mikhail Bulgakov's plays through the prism of his specific tragic-grotesque view of the new post-revolutionary reality. The marginal instability of this reality inspires the emergence of a special literary perception in unstable, parodic genre formations that deviate from the canons and are organized by grotesque. The material of the analytical reading is Bulgakov's plays Zoyka's Apartment, Bliss, Ivan Vasilievich, The Days of the Turbins, Flight. The study has shown the following. (1) In the tragic farce Zoyka's Apartment, there is a distinct tendency to a parodic distortion of tragedy parameters within the comedy genre. (2) The poetics of the comedic dilogy about a Soviet engineer's traveling in time - Bliss and Ivan Vasilievich - includes the codes of a tragedy in a travestized form. The codes develop the topic of the formation of a dictator's personality, which was fundamentally important for Bulgakov and irreversible for the historical time. (3) In the play The Days of the Turbins, the intensity of the tragic historical situation, the political and psychological reliability of the reflected events are depicted in the text space synthesizing various genre codes in a parodic inversion. The comedy layer of the play is associated with the image of a cousin from Zhytomyr typologically close to the tragicomic characters of losers. (4) Flight reveals the parodically interpreted comedy codes. The author's definition of the genre of the play - “Eight Dreams. A Play in Five Acts” - points to the non-classical structure of the text, emphasizing the phantasmagoricity and absurdity of the world destroyed by the revolution. Its reflection requires the absolutization of the forms of the tragedy refracted in the author's consciousness and acquiring grotesque features. As a result of the textual analysis of the plays in the genre paradigm, the following conclusions are drawn. In search of a dramaturgic form to reflect the tragically and grotesquely perceived reality, its absurdity, Mikhail Bulgakov boldly combines elements of different genres, travesties, parodies, transforms them, gives new shades to the genre features of the comedy, the tragedy, the “drama proper” (V.G. Belinsky), constructs his individual creative model of the meta-genre. Bulgakov's literary experiments in playwrighting are considered in the mainstream of the general aesthetic tendency of parody and a grotesque worldview in the Russian literature of the first third of the twentieth century.

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