Retardation in Nineteenth-Century Plays about Bureaucracy

Bureaucracy was an extremely popular theme in Russian drama in the 1850s. It seems to be a promising direction for modern historical and literary studies, as well as narratology. The article describes the functions of retardation in nineteenth-century plays that featured bureaucracy. It focuses on the artistic device of retardation, its place in the composition, its effect on the reader, its role in the speech of minor characters, etc. The research compared Vladimir Sollogub’s T he Official (1856), Aleksei Potekhin’s Tinsel (1858), and Nikolai Lvov’s T he World Is Not Without Good People (1857) against Alexander Ostrovsky’s iconic A Profitable Position (1856). The plays were subjected to the structural-semantic method, which made it possible to identify and describe their composition and characters with their ideological-conceptual impact on the story. The typological analysis of the plays was compared with that of Ostrovsky’s epic drama. In the minor plays, retardation helped to increase the tension before the denouement; in Ostrovsky’s comedy, it relieved the tension. Ostrovsky used the continuous retardation in the narratives of secondary characters to slow down the plot development and emphasize the semantic multifacetedness. In the epic drama, retardation blurred the boundaries of the dramatic situation to showcase its uncertainty, making the denouement nothing but a formal ending.