Melodramatic Scenarios and Modes of Marginality: The Poetics of Anton Chekhov's Early Drama and of Fin-de-Siecle Russian Popular Drama.
Shevchenko, Mila B.
2008
Abstract
The dissertation explores the poetics of Chekhov’s early drama, a selection of his prose, and some of the popular, but now little known dramatists writing concurrently with Chekhov: L. Antropov, Ipp. Shpazhinskii, P. Boborykin, and Al. Sumbatov-Iuzhin. I analyze their oeuvre in the context of the socio-cultural changes that took place in fin-de-siècle Russian scene. The study focuses on the ways melodrama serves as a vehicle for the discussion of marginality and examines how the melodramatic mode facilitates the expression of ideological vacuum, existential crises, dysfunctionality, and psychological trauma. A special emphasis is placed on the playwrights’ diverse repertoire of spatial stratagems and devices. With Chekhov, I scrutinize his implementation of misplacement, katabasis, claustral space, as well as the ways he employs the exterior and interior space, the interaction of dramatic and stage space, and on- and off-stage space. I also show how Chekhov subverts and rearranges the constituents of one of the most conservative dramatic structures in such a way that the readily identifiable ‘moral teleology’ is frustrated. Approaching the popular drama of the 1880s and 1890s as a cultural representation of the intellectual and spiritual anxieties of Russian society, I analyze various paradigms of marginality as manifested in several subgenres of familial drama (“melodrama of adultery”, “revenge” melodrama, “socio-psychological” drama) and the shifts within the representation of villainy, victimization, innocence, and martyrdom through the prism of “spatial-ethical hierarchy.” The study considers the process of self-reflection and self-identification by which the fin-de-siècle individual constructs an identity somewhere between center and periphery, fictional and real, high and low. Analysis of such fluctuations yields a better understanding of the changes in the “superfluous man,” an emblematic culturologeme of nineteenth-century Russian literature, and the emergence of a new category, “broken people.” The thesis not only offers a new reading of Chekhov’s early drama in light of the popular drama of the 1880s and 1890s, but it also reconsiders popular drama as a valuable cultural phenomenon in itself.Subjects
Chekhov's Drama Russian Drama Russian Melodrama 19 Th. C. Russian Drama
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