Shakespeare and the Fight for Promfinplan, or How High Voltage is Made

Journal Title: Studia Litterarum - Year 2017, Vol 2, Issue 3

Abstract

In his play Announcement of Death (the initial title of the play High Voltage), Platonov used documentary facts he observed in 1929–1930s while staying at the Leningrad metal factory. The play was intended to fulfil the political order of RAPP to represent “a live example of a specific enterprise and specific individuals.” Platonov coped with this task. The play tells the story of heroic struggle of engineers and workers endeavoring to implement the factory’s work plan. It shows a sharp conflict of characters and worldviews. In the replicas of the main characters, engineers of the “old school,” one can recognize vocabulary and style of the harsh reviews of Platonov’s work by literary critics and Stalin. In the characters themselves, one can recognize their alter egos — representatives of the so called creative intelligentsia of the reconstruction era, Mayakovsky and Zelinsky. The motif of love plays a special role in the play in that it introduces a new level of meaning. The “manufacture play” reveals a tragedy that stages the “borderline” situation and places a free-willed person at the center of the represented events as the only true value of the world. The essay argues that Platonov was aware of the discussions around Shakespeare unfolding in 1931. RAPP critics encouraged authors “to catch up with and overtake not only some Pilnyak — this it is not a great honor, the proletarian literature has already caught up with him and overtaken him. The challenge is to catch up with and overtake Shakespeare.” Platonov succeeded in combining the high tone of Shakespearean tragedy with the plot of the “manufacture play” despite the general sneer at RAPP’s attempts to shakespearize plays about Soviet factory leaders — the so called “udarniki.”

Authors and Affiliations

D. S. Moskovskaya

Keywords

Related Articles

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH’S PASSIONS: BETWEEN DRAMA AND LYRICS

Johann Sebastian Bach’s Passions are considered to be a synthesis of dramatic and lyric principles. Traditional comparison of Passions with musical drama or ancient tragedy does not exhaustively express the nature of t...

“The Testament” of XII Pandito Hambo-Lama Dashidorzhi Ithegelov in the Context of Buddhist Philosophy

The article deals with a hitherto unexamined literary text written by a famous Buddhist philosopher and scientist XII Pandito Hambo-Lama Dashidorzhi Itigelov. This text is the last poem by D. Itigelov entitled “The Test...

THE ROLE OF AUTHORIAL SELF-REFLECTION IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE NEW BELARUSIAN LITERATURE ( EARLY 20 TH CENTURY )

The essay focuses on the development of a new Belarusian literature in the early decades of the 20 th century and the ways Belarusian writers reflected on the perspectives of the national literary development. During thi...

“THE VERSE ABOUT THE HOLY MOUNTAIN” BY VYACHESLAV IVANOV: A CLOSE READING. FIRST ESSAY

In the course of his literary career, Vyacheslav Ivanov repeatedly turned to the genre of spiritual verse (dukhovnyi stikh). This genre implies a specifc poetic form, certain stylistic properties, performance, and circ...

“YOUR P.C.W.” THE UNPUBLISHED LETTERS OF PAUL SCHEERBART TO ERICH MÜHSAM

The archive of a German writer and anarchist Erich Mühsam (1878– 1934) is a signifcant but “unexplored” part of the manuscript collection of the A. M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Scien...

Download PDF file
  • EP ID EP26173
  • DOI 10.22455/2500-4247-2017-2-3-220-235
  • Views 304
  • Downloads 13

How To Cite

D. S. Moskovskaya (2017). Shakespeare and the Fight for Promfinplan, or How High Voltage is Made. Studia Litterarum, 2(3), -. https://europub.co.uk/articles/-A-26173