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

to what happens in the mutual relations between myself and the world I see,
and this too is not merely a formula of existence, but also a necessary
convention without which neither I nor the world could exist. I have then
examined certain consequences of the formula convention of the theatre and
found that neither the stage overflowing into the audience nor the audience
dictating its will to the stage can break this convention without destroying
the essential idea of the drama. And here again the concept can be likened,
on a higher level, to the philosophy of existence by saying that in life,
too, any attempt at tampering with the world or any attempt by the world to
tamper with me is extremely risky business even if in both cases the best
intentions are implied. And finally I have spoken of how reading a play and
seeing a play correspond to living one's life and dreaming of one's life, of
how both experiences afford the same pleasure, if in somewhat different
ways.


The Tragedy of Tragedy

Discussion of the technique of modern tragedy means to me a grim
examination of something which may be termed the tragedy of the art of
tragedy. The bitterness with which I view the plight of playwriting does not
really imply that all is lost and that the contemporary theatre may be
dismissed with that rather primitive gesture--a shrug of the shoulders. But
what I do mean is that unless something is done by somebody, and done soon,
playwriting will cease to be the subject of any discussion dealing with
literary values. The drama will be completely taken over by showmanship,
completely absorbed by that other art, the art of staging and acting, a
great art to be sure which I love ardently but which is as remote from the
writer's essential business as any other art: painting, or music, or
dancing. Thus, a play will be created by the management, the actors, the
stagehands--and a couple of meek scriptwriters whom nobody heeds; it will be
based on collaboration, and collaboration will certainly never produce
anything as permanent as can be the work of one man because however much
talent the collaborators may individually possess the final result will
unavoidably be a compromise between talents, a certain average, a trimming
and clipping, a rational number distilled out of the fusion of irrational
ones. This complete transferring of everything connected with the drama into
hands which, according to my firm belief, are meant to receive the ripe
fruit (the final result of one man's labor), is a rather dismal prospect,
but it may be the logical outcome of the conflict which has been tearing the
drama, and especially tragedy, for several centuries.
First of all let us attempt to define what we mean by "tragedy." As
used in everyday speech, the term is so closely allied to the idea of
destiny as to be almost synonymous with it--at least when the presupposed
destiny is not one that we would be inclined to relish. In this sense,
tragedy without a background of fate is hardly perceptible to the ordinary
observer. If, say, a person goes out and kills another person, of more or
less the same sex, just because he happened to be that day in a more or less
killing mood, there is no tragedy or, more exactly, the murderer in this
case is not a tragic character. He will tell the police that everything went