Release:
2025. Vol. 11. № 1 (41)About the author:
Valery V. Dunnikov, Postgraduate, Department of Russian and Foreign Philology, Vladimir State University named after Alexander and Nikolay Stoletovs, Vladimir, RussiaAbstract:
Both coinciding with the postmodernist standard and diverging from it, Nina Sadur’s dramaturgy raises several research problems. First of all, the problem of style: the simple emphasized and unpretentious language of her plays hides the idea of the absurdity of human existence, existential reflections on personal freedom, and postmodern intertextuality. Another problem is the place in the dramatic tradition: Sadur’s dramaturgy occupies a borderline position between the classics of the 19th c. and the postmodernism of the second half of the 20th and ealy 21st c. Modern literary studies correlate Nina Sadur’s works with absurdism, postmodernism, and fantastic realism. As the results show, the play Go! has combined the features of all the above-mentioned trends. Its characters, a Peasant and an Old Lady in Boots, embody certain cultural archetypes, demonstrating how postmodernism works with cultural clichés. The image of the Engine Driver, painfully searching for a way out of his life’s impasse, echoes the images of characters in drama and theatre of the absurd. The play’s plot is close to both absurdism with its frozen time and expectation of unknown danger, and fantastic realism with a fundamental amalgam of real and fantastic beginnings without the final triumph of either of them. The poetics of the play can be clarified using the methods of hermeneutic, mythopoetic, motive and intertextual analysis. A detailed examination of the work has shown that it does not contain the illogism inherent in classical examples of the theatre of the absurd. This allows the author to enhance the play’s conflict, to introduce allusions to Russian classical literary works, to use special theatrical effects, contrasting the characters’ static nature and the electric locomotive’s movement, as well as introducing the motif of a hidden battle between the calm and judicious Old Lady in Boots and the active Engine Driver for the life and soul of the Peasant. Thus, absurdity, as well as its absence, operates in the play at the level of individual characters, and postmodernist strategies are constructive rather than essential: they organize the action rather than characterize the play’s ideas.Keywords:
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