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

another cannot indulge in communist propaganda, or in any other kind of
propaganda.
I don't see any difference because, perhaps, all kinds of propaganda
leave me perfectly cold whether their subject appeals to me or not. But what
I do mean is that whenever propaganda is contained in a play the determinist
chain is drawn still tighter around the throat of the tragic muse. In Soviet
tragedies, moreover, we get a special kind of dualism which makes them
well-nigh unbearable--in book form at least. The wonders of staging and
acting that have been preserved in Russia since the nineties of the last
century, when the Art Theatre appeared, can certainly make entertainment
even out of the lowest trash. The dualism to which I refer, and which is the
most typical and remarkable feature of the Soviet drama, consists in the
following: We know and Soviet authors know that the dialectical idea of any
Soviet tragedy must be that party emotions, emotions related to the worship
of the State, are above ordinary human or bourgeois feeling, so that any
form of moral or physical cruelty, if and when it leads to the triumph of
Socialism, is admissible. On the other hand, because the play must be good
melodrama, in order to attract popular fancy, there is a kind of queer
agreement that certain actions may not be performed even by the most
consistent Bolshevik--such as cruelty to children or betrayal of a friend;
that is, mingled with the most traditional heroics of all times, we find the
rosiest sentimentalities of old-fashioned fiction. So that, in the long run,
the most extreme form of leftist theatre, notwithstanding its healthy looks
and dynamic harmonies, is really a reversion to the most primitive and
hackneyed forms of literature.
I would not wish, however, to create the impression that, if I fail to
be spiritually excited by modern drama, I deny it all value. As a matter of
fact, here and there, in Strindberg, in Chekhov, in Shaw's brilliant farces
(especially Candida), in at least one Galsworthy play (for instance,
Strife), in one or two French plays (for instance, Lenormand's Time Is a
Dream), in one or two American plays such as the first act of The Children's
Hour and the first act of Of Mice and Men (the rest of the play is dismal
nonsense)--in many existing plays, there are indeed magnificent bits,
artistically rendered emotions and, most important, that special atmosphere
which is the sign that the author has freely created a world of his own. But
the perfect tragedy has not yet been produced.
The idea of conflict tends to endow life with a logic it never has.
Tragedies based exclusively on the logic of conflict are as untrue to life
as an all-pervading class-struggle idea is untrue to history. Most of the
worst and deepest human tragedies, far from following the marble rules of
tragic conflict, are tossed on the stormy element of chance. This element of
chance playwrights have so completely excluded from their dramas that any
denouement due to an earthquake or to an automobile accident strikes the
audience as incongruous if, naturally, the earthquake has not been expected
all along or the automobile has not been a dramatic investment from the very
start. The life of a tragedy is, as it were, too short for accidents to
happen; but at the same time tradition demands that life on the stage
develop according to rules-- the rules of passionate conflict-- rules whose
rigidity is at least as ridiculous as the stumblings of chance. What even
the greatest playwrights have never realized is that chance is not always