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
- EP ID EP26173
- DOI 10.22455/2500-4247-2017-2-3-220-235
- Views 340
- Downloads 13
“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...
LITERARY PROCESS IN GERMANY AT THE TURN OF THE 19th and 20th CENTURIES: INTERACTION OF LITERARY TRENDS
The article discusses dynamic interaction among artistic communities (trends, movements, etc.) exploring the specificity of literary space in Germany at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. This is a comparative st...
BOUNDARIES BETWEEN FICTION AND FACT IN THE LIGHT OF THE THREE LEVEL COMPARATIVE STUDIES
The author’s aim is to reconsider the difference between fact and fiction in diachronic, comparative, and interdisciplinary perspective. The study covers a long period, mainly from the 17th Century to the present time,...
TRAGICOMEDY OF CARLO GOLDONI
Goldoni’s tragicomedies while being less popular and lesser studied than his comedies nonetheless provide us with rich material for the study of the genre’s general properties. Goldoni’s tragicomedies fall into two grou...
“And time future contained in time past”: British Modernist Poetry from T.S. Eliot to Ted Hughes
It seems that T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) and Ted Hughes (1930–1998) are poets of different individual talents and epochs. Hughes, a poet of the second half of the 20th century, concentrated on the conflict between Nature a...