Game motive as routine paradoxalization in A. Shipenko's play The Chess Game

The category of the motive has already been elaborated in folklore and narrative texts.However, the question whether it can be applied to drama has not yet been properly raised. One faces the theoretical impediments duringthe research of motive semantics of the dramatic piece due to the definition of the motive through the narrative text structure. Such adefinition is given by I.V. Silantyev, in particular. From our point of view, the analysis of the motive in dramatic pieces will yield greatresults. The peculiarity of the drama motive reveals in it being a generalization of a range of communicative events, which form somekind of the ''boundary'', i. e. an interaction zone between the stage and the audience. The object of our research is Russian drama of the1970s - 1990s. The analysis of the literary work of the above-mentioned period is conducted by comparing functional meanings of thegame motive. The analysis also aims at testing the hypothesis on the evolution of the given motive from the ''game is a metaphor of life''principle to the ''game is a way of existence'' principle, which is mainly found in the plays of the late 1980s - 1990s and the beginning ofthe 2000s. The purpose of this article is to analyze the role of the game motive in The Chess Game, a play by A. Shipenko from theviewpoint of the phenomenon, which presents a matter of exceptional interest for theatre. The choice of this particular play is explainedby the following reasons: the phenomenon of the game is in the name of the play; the drama is experimental by its nature, that is why itsinnovation features are explicit; the fact that the play was written during the Perestroika period highlights the borderline condition notonly in the society but in literature as well. The Chess Game is a monodrama. There is only one female character on the stage. It isemphasized that she is not a real actress: she was simply paid $ 20 to ''sit'' on the stage for twenty minutes. The refusal to play (the girlinforms everyone that there will be no performance) results neither in the end of the game situation nor in the destruction of the gamespace. It forms the complication of the open communicative event, though. Paradoxically, no one can put an end to the game even whenthere is an idea of its termination. The communicative event is modeled in the following way: the viewer's attention is not only focusedon the stage - audience interaction (as it usually happens), but it penetrates the consciousness of the female character;autocommunication is formed. The game motive in the play by A. Shipenko models the hopelessness which is actually the artisticgeneralization we were looking for projected on the commonplace sense. The paradoxical side of it is that it states what is denied by it,and denies what it states, without triggering any contentious contradictions.

Keywords

Authors

References