“Fidelity,” a Tragedy by O. F. Bergholz: the Concept and the Genre

The pretext of an early version of O. F. Bergholz’s work entitled “The City of Glory. A Dramatic Poem” (1948) and the final version of this text, which received the nomination “Fidelity. Tragedy” (1954), was the essay “Leningrad — Sevastopol” (1944). The title and the subtitle explicated the author’s new intention, shifting attention from the heroic topos to the value system of the characters. The word ‘loyalty’, correlated with the root lexeme ‘trust’, and the subtitle express the author’s position: Bergholz conceptualized the loss of social trust in an existential manner (“Where a person does not trust a person, / there is no people and there is no fatherland”). The theme of trust is actualized in the images of Anna, who was released from German prisons without betraying anyone to the enemies, but who still fears human condemnation, and the museum curator Khmara (his prototype was the archaeologist A. K. Takhtai, unfairly accused of collaborating with the German invaders). The loss of trust between people leads to the spiritual underground and the destruction of national unity. “Fidelity” is written without resorting to the genre canon, with a rejection of the death of the characters and with a happy ending. The specifics of the dramatic conflict is contingent on the fact that the conflict is “inside” the heroic material of the play. When analyzing Bergholz’s genre rationale, the author’s tragic worldview should be taken into account. Literary criticism of the Soviet era considered the work ambivalently: within the framework of both poetic and tragic genre canons. The conducted study of the poetess’s genre reflexives demonstrate the representativeness of the her extra-textual definition of the work as “the tragedy of our time”.