A. F. PISEMSKY’S COMEDY «PREDATORS» IN THE CONTEXT OF THE SECOND HALF 19th CENTURY PLAYS ABOUT OFFICIALS

The article is devoted to solving the question of the correlation degree of A. F. Pisemsky’s comedy «Predators» with the poetics of Russian classical plays about officials in the second half of the 19th century main features («A Profitable Place» by A. N. Ostrovsky, «Shadows» by M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, «The Case» and «Death of Tarelkin» by A. V. Sukhovo-Kobylin). The plays under consideration are united by the acuteness of social issues, similar principles of portraying the St. Petersburg higher bureaucracy, careerism and bribery of officials, the uncertainty of genre identification, and the method of zoologizing images. The ideological and thematic similarity of the plays «Predators» and «Shadows» has been revealed. Unlike the plays of Ostrovsky, Saltykov-Shchedrin, and Sukhovo-Kobylin’s «The Case», Pisemsky’s comedy is devoid of sympathetic characters, which makes it similar to «Death of Tarelkin», but «Predators» does not contain grotesque deformations and farcical features. In the finales of the plays under consideration (with the exception of the « A Profitable Place») there is no triumph of virtue, which underlines the idea that it is impossible to eliminate the depravity of the bureaucratic social order. Comedy of A. F. Pisemsky «Predators» draws on the artistic discoveries of contemporary playwrights, authors of plays about officials, and creatively develops them, which reveals, on the one hand, the common ideological and artistic aspirations of Russian playwrights of this period, and, on the other, the distinctive character of Pisemsky’s comedian.