Известия Уральского федерального университета. Серия 2: Гуманитарные науки (Mar 2019)
On Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Playwriting in the Play The Light that Is in You (Candle in the Wind)
Abstract
This article is a poetic analysis of The Light that Is in You (Candle in the Wind), a play by A. I. Solzhenitsyn. At the same time, the main emphasis is placed on the author’s dramatic technique and the peculiarities of his dramatic thinking. It is well known that the writer himself gave his plays a secondary status in relation to prose. Most researchers believe that his drama experiments are interesting artistically only as a problem-themed propaedeutic of his later epic works (primarily, the novel In the First Circle) and their artistic value is relatively insignificant. However, more and more recent articles refute this opinion. Specific analysis of the above-mentioned play allows us to see both the advantages and disadvantages of Solzhenitsyn’s dramatic art. The former are a wide problem-thematic range of the Candle, raising a set of spiritual and moral issues that are central for the writer’s creative work, such as the definition of a system of values by humans and the inevitability of payback for the choices they make, the responsibility of scientists for their scientific discoveries, the beneficence of loneliness and/or life for the sake of another. The leading markers in solving these problems are the concepts of suffering, conscience, and guilt. The author of the article highlights such successful decisions the writer makes as the musical component of the composition of the play, the inclusion of a dystopian perspective in the structure of the dramatic text, the complex system of interacting symbolic series within the work, etc. The article notes, on the other hand, the genre ambiguity of the work, the excessive use of the sideline plots, the incompatibility of the situation and the remarks made, which in many ways, according to the author of the article, is a consequence of the features of the writer’s own artistic thinking In the First Circle and Cancer Ward, its didacticism and its focus on the epic universal description of things.
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