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

stumbling and that the tragedies of real life are based on the beauty or
horror of chance--not merely on its ridiculousness. And it is this secret
rhythm of chance that one would like to see pulsating in the veins of the
tragic muse. Otherwise, if only the rules of conflict and fate and divine
justice and imminent death are followed, tragedy is limited both by its
platform and by its unswerving doom, and becomes in the long run a hopeless
scuffle--the scuffle between a condemned man and the executioner. But life
is not a scaffold, as tragic playwrights tend to suggest. I have so seldom
been moved by the tragedy I have seen or read because I could never believe
in the ridiculous laws that they presupposed. The charm of tragic genius,
the charm of Shakespeare or Ibsen, lies for me in quite another region.
What then ought tragedy to be if I deny it what is considered its most
fundamental characteristic--conflict ruled by the causal laws of human fate?
First of all I doubt the real existence of these laws in the simple and
severe form that the stage has adopted. I doubt that any strict line can be
drawn between the tragic and the burlesque, fatality and chance, causal
subjection and the caprice of free will. What seems to me to be the higher
form of tragedy is the creation of a certain unique pattern of life in which
the sorrows and passing of a particular man will follow the rules of his own
individuality, not the rules of the theatre as we know them. It would be
absurd to suggest, however, that accident and chance may be left to play
havoc with life on the stage. But it is not absurd to say that a writer of
genius may discover exactly the right harmony of such accidental
occurrences, and that this harmony, without suggesting anything like the
iron laws of tragic fatality, will express certain definite combinations
that occur in life. And it is high time, too, for playwrights to forget the
notions that they must please the audience and that this audience is a
collection of half-wits; that plays, as one writer on the subject solemnly
asserts, must never contain anything important in the first ten minutes,
because, you see, late dinners are the fashion; and that every important
detail must be repeated so that even the least intelligent spectator will at
last grasp the idea. The only audience that a playwright must imagine is the
ideal one, that is, himself. All the rest pertains to the box-office, not to
dramatic art.
"That's all very fine," said the producer leaning back in his armchair
and puffing on the cigar which fiction assigns to his profession, "that's
all very fine--but business is business, so how can you expect plays based
on some new technique which will make them unintelligible to the general
public, plays not only departing from tradition, but flaunting their
disregard for the wits of the audience, tragedies which arrogantly reject
the causal fundamentals of the particular form of dramatic art that they
represent--how can you expect such plays to be produced by any big theatre
company?" Well, I don't--and this, too, is the tragedy of tragedy.