"Владимир Набоков. Эссе о драматургии (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

man remain in the bleak garden, on the damp steps, for a good talk with his
daughter and his wife--especially with his wife. The casual reasons for his
not going into the house, which are inserted here and there in the talk,
keep excluding one another in a most fascinating way--and the tragedy of the
act is not the tragedy of the old man's relations with his wife, but the
tragedy of an honest, tired, hungry, helpless human being, grimly held by
the author who, until the act is over, keeps him away from bath, slippers
and supper.
The peculiar technique of this play and of other plays by other authors
is not so much the result of poor talent, as the unavoidable result of the
illusion that life and thus dramatic art picturing life should be based on a
steady current of cause and effect driving us towards the ocean of death.
The themes, the ideas of tragedies have certainly changed, but the change is
unfortunately just the change in an actor's dressing room, mere new
disguises that only appear new, but whose interplay is always the same:
conflict between this and that, and then the same iron rules of conflict
leading either to a happy or miserable end, but always to some end which is
unavoidably contained in the cause. Nothing ever fizzles out in a tragedy,
though perhaps one of the tragedies of life is that even the most tragic
situations just fizzle out. Anything remotely resembling an accident is
taboo. The conflicting characters are not live people, but types--and this
is especially noticeable in the absurd though well-meant plays, which are
supposed to depict--if not to solve--the tragedy of the present times. In
such plays what I call the island or Grand Hotel or Magnolia Street method
is used, that is, the grouping of people in a dramatically convenient,
strictly limited space with either social tradition or some outside calamity
preventing their dispersal. In such tragedies the old German refugee, though
otherwise fairly stolid, will invariably love music, the Russian migr
woman will be a fascinating vamp and rave about Tsars and the snow, the Jew
will be married to a Christian, the spy will be blond and bland, and the
young married couple naive and pathetic--and so on and on--and no matter
where you group them it is always the same old story (even the transatlantic
Clipper has been tried, and certainly nobody heeded the critics who humbly
asked what engineering device had been used to eliminate the roar of the
propellers). The conflict of ideas replacing the conflict of passion changes
nothing in the essential pattern--if anything, it makes it still more
artificial. Hobnobbing with the audience through the medium of a chorus has
been tried, only resulting in the destruction of the main and fundamental
agreement on which stage drama can be based. This agreement is: we are aware
of the characters on the stage, but cannot move them; they are unaware of
us, but can move us--a perfect division which, when tampered with,
transforms plays into what they are today.
The Soviet tragedies are in fact the last word in the cause-and-effect
pattern, plus something that the bourgeois stage is helplessly groping for:
a good machine god that will do away with the need to search for a plausible
final effect. This god, coming inevitably at the end of Soviet tragedy and
indeed regulating the whole play, is none other than the idea of the perfect
state as understood by communists. I do not wish to imply that what
irritates me here is propaganda. In fact, I don't see why if, say, one type
of theatre may indulge in patriotic propaganda or democratic propaganda