Tomashevskaya N.V. Moral choice in drama by A.D. Salynsky

One of the most pressing questions for Soviet drama after the “Thaw” was that of the limits of personal responsibility. The industrial conflict, so typical of plays of the 1940s–1950s, ceased to be self-sufficient: audiences and critics expected the playwright to present not merely a clash between an “innovator” and a “conservative,” but also the hero’s inner struggle with himself. The author of the article analyses the way this transformation unfolds at the level of dramatic poetics. In the works by A.D. Salynsky, embracing nearly three decades, one can trace a consistent evolution of moral choice — from the external sanction of the collective to the internal imperative and, finally, to its powerlessness. However, in the reviewed researches this dynamic is not focused on. The analysis presented in these papers is static. The conflict in each individual play is captured, without raising the why-question. For instance, “Rumors” (1980) is fundamentally different in structure from “A Dangerous Companion” (1952). The present contribution fills in this gap, proposing to consider four key plays by Salynsky as stages of a single dramaturgical quest.