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

emotion can be established by Aeschylus when the profoundest scholars
themselves cannot say for sure in what way this or that context points, what
exactly we are to guess here and what there, and then wind up saying that
the removal of the article from this or that word obscures and has in fact
made unintelligible the connection and construction of the sentence. Indeed,
the main drama seems to take place in these minute and copious footnotes.
However, the excitements of inspired grammar are not exactly the emotions
which the theatre can greet, and on the other hand what passes muster as
Greek tragedy on our stage is so far removed from the original, so
influenced by this or that stage version and stage invention, and these in
turn are so influenced by the secondary conventions which the primary ones
of Greek tragedy had engendered, that it is hard to say what we mean when we
praise Aeschylus.
One thing is, however, certain: the idea of logical fate which,
unfortunately, we inherited from the ancients has, ever since, been keeping
the drama in a kind of concentration camp. Now and then a genius would
escape as Shakespeare did more often than not; Ibsen has half-escaped in
Doll's House, while in his Borkman the drama actually leaves the stage and
goes up a winding road, up a remote hill--a curious symbol of that urge
which genius feels to be free from the shackles of convention. But Ibsen has
sinned too: he had spent many years in Scribia, and in this respect the
incredibly absurd results to which the conventions of causality can lead are
well displayed in the Pillars of Society. The plot, as you remember, turns
on the idea of two ships, one good and the other bad. One of them, the
Gypsy, is now in beautiful shape as it lies all ready to sail for America in
the shipyard of which the main character is master. The other ship, the
Indian Girl, is blessed with all the ills that can befall a ship. It is old
and rickety, manned by a wild drunken crew, and it is not repaired before
its return voyage to America--just carelessly patched up by the overseer
(act of sabotage against the new kinds of machinery which lessen the
earnings of workers). The main character's brother is supposed to sail to
America, and the main character has reasons to wish his brother at the
bottom of the sea. Simultaneously, the main character's little son is
secretly preparing to run away to sea. Given these circumstances, the author
was forced by the goblins of cause and effect to subject everything
concerning the ships to the different emotional and physical moves of the
characters with a view to achieving the maximum of effect when,
simultaneously, both brother and son put out to sea--the brother sailing on
the good ship instead of the bad one which, against all rules, knowing it
was rotten, the villain allows to sail, and his adored son heading for the
bad one, so that he will perish through his father's fault. The moves of the
play are exceedingly complicated, and the weather--now stormy, now fair, now
again dirty--is adjusted to these various moves, always in such a manner as
to give the maximum of suspense without bothering about likelihood. When one
follows this "shipyard line" throughout the play, one notices that it forms
a pattern which in a very comical way turns out to be specially, and solely,
adapted to the needs of the author. The weather is forced to resort to the
most eerie dialectical tricks, and, when at the happy ending the ships do
sail (without the boy who has been retrieved just in time, and with the
brother who at the last moment proved to be not worth killing), the weather