Dramaturgia rosyjska przełomu XIX i XX wieku w świetle przemian teatru w Europie

Abstract

The present dissertation is an attempt to handle the remarkably variegated and interesting material. As its title itself suggests, the dissertation is built around two focal points. The issues discussed here include, on one hand, the selected works of Russian and Western dramatists, which arise no objections, and, on the other hand, the reformatory conceptions of the theatre which were contemporary with the aforementioned plays. We are particularly concerned here with those reformatory conceptions which relate to the Great Reform of the Theatre and which provide a context for our analysis of the construction of the literary works. Such orientation of the scientific research denotes in practice an examination of the relationship between drama, which is conceived here as, first of all, a theatrical work of art and a selected theory of the theatre. On the pages of the present dissertation the structure of the selected dramatic works which were created between 1880 and 1916 is being traced. The aforementioned period of 1880 que 1916 is recognised as the first stage of the Great Reform of the theatre, it being time of the creative activity of its eminent legislators - Edward Gordon Craig, Adolphe Appia and Georg Fuchs. This very fact played and important role in the considerations concerning the relationship between dramaturgy and the art of theatre. The study includes an in-depth analysis of the plays of Alexander Blok, whose almost entire literary output is presented on the pages of the present dissertation. Besides, the plays which became the subject of our consideration are the selected works of other Russian writers-symbolists - Konstanty Balmont’s Three Mornings, Walery Briusows The Earth, Fiodor Sologub’s Victory of Death, Leonid Andriejew’s Ocean, Die Life of Man. Moreover, the discussion extends over the following works of the Western European writers: August Strindberg’s Play of Dreams and To Damaskias, Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Every, The Fool and the Death, Ariadna atNyxsos and Stanislaw Wyspianski’s The Wedding Party and The Legion. The most extensive part of the current study, the chapter titled THE NEW SCENE THE NEW SPACE is devoted to the spacial architectonics of the drama and its relationship with the respective theories of the theatre. The analysis of the scenic space made it possible to classify the presented dramatic works into two groups. The first of the groups includes the plays whose space is divided into two plans: the traditional plan, which is possible to be presented by means of the devices accessible to the box-stage and which exists side by side as parallel to or as remaining in a relation of dependance with the innovatory plan. Another type of the construction of the innovatory spacial architectonics can be observes also in the second group of the analysed plays which we call here the dramas of the monumental space. It is about such unlimited and absolutely fabricated world of the theater that the Reformers were dreaming. The interests of thé Great Reformers concerning the acting are reviewed in the third part of the thesis titled THE LIVING DOLL. The assumption of the study was finding relationship between the theory of the reformers and the composition of the plays. As a result of the analysis which was carried out in this chapter we came to a conclusion that the characters in the discussed type of dramaturgy, in order to be fully transposed into a scenic figure, need the participation of an actor who is formed under the influence of the theory of the New Reform The analysis carried out in this part of the dissertation proved that it is this kind of actor that the is needed both by the traditional characers (i.e. the characters whose archetypes already functioned in the literary tradition) and by the innovatory ones. The most outstanding testimony of the presence of the ideas postulated by the great Reformers in the dramaturgy of the turn of centuries is the role which was attributed to the elements of the dramatic material other than a word (a word was rejected by Craig, Appia and Fuchs on the basis that a word on its own is incapable of creating vision). These (non-verbal) elements include: light, colur, sound. The question of the non-verbal elements is taken up and discussed in the fourth part of the work titled INSTEAD OF A WORD. It is impossible to over-appreciate the importance of these very components of performance in the productions created by the Great Reformers where they became the elements of Craig’s desired „vision that appeals to the spectator without words”. Careful examination of the construction of the selected dramatic works from the perspective of their similarity to the chosen theatrical theories of the turn of the 19th and the 20th centuries authorised us to claim that it is in the scenic works that the most visible traces of these theories are left. As it is known, the Reform of Theatre ended in 1941, only sixty years after it was born. Many of its demands fell in oblivion in the course of history, many were verified and, although one cannot of course question its influence on the direction which the development of theatrical art followed, one can assert that it is exactly in the drama where the most conspicuous traces of the phenomenon were left. The current dissertation is an attempt to prove this assertion.