The Chronotope of Post Office in the New Russian Drama of the 1990s

The article aims to analyse the chronotope of post office as represented in the New Russian Drama of the 1990s: Persidskaya siren ’ [Persian Lilac] by Nikolay Kolyada and Russkaya narodnaya pochta [Russian People’s Post] by Oleg Bogayev. The authors characterise the chronotope of post office in the aspects of plot, emotion, and character, establish the relationship between the chronotope of post office and the chronotope of road and crisis, argue that the logocentric consciousness of Russian man is conceptualized by the chronotope of post office. The invariant structure of the chronotope is determined by the historical and social conditions of the emergence of Kolyada’s and Bogayev’s plays. The post office illustrates the feelings of a “little man” who experiences a temporal and spatial shift. Represented in different ways, the structure of the chronotope has common features: functional significance and correlation with a certain literary type of hero. It is a humiliated man with his rights infringed and with his life forgotten by history. He chooses postal communication because distancing (subjects are in different time and space) allows avoiding direct contact which is very painful for the heroes. Epistolary communication is the only accessible way for a disadvantaged person to engage in dialogue with the world and to save his rights to speak and be heard. Therefore, the chronotope of post office contrasts to the chronotope of house (to be more accurate, that of khrushchevka) in Kolyada’s and Bogayev’s plays. In the former, the space of understanding and safety transforms into the space of estrangement and aggression. At the same time, postal communication also does not bring confidence and calm to the heroes because the post office rules are violated (stealing letters in Kolyada’s play or the same addressee and addresser in Bogayev’s play). The crisis of private and social life is illustrated in different ways in the plays, including in the chronotope. In this case, the chronotope of post office can be considered as a variant of the chronotope of road (where people who would hardly meet in another space meet) and the chronotope of crisis (the feeling of crisis and disaster becomes the basis of the comic, farcical, and tragic unity). Nevertheless, the chronotope of post office represents a special four-dimensional space where heroes can feel connection with the past and assert their importance and right to exist in the written word, which directly correlates with the logocentric tradition of Russian culture.

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