Documentary as a Multiple Reality: Verbatim “The Sun Rises”

• Main Author: V. N. Skachkova
• Format: Article
• Language: Russian
• Published: Tsentr nauchnykh i obrazovatelnykh proektov 2020-01-01
• Series: Научный диалог
• Subjects: verbatim; new drama; documentary; emotiveness; gorky; documentary sources; artistic reality; text
• Online Access: https://www.nauka-dialog.ru/jour/article/view/137

The article is devoted to the analysis of the mythopoetic structure of the documentary drama “The Sun Rises” related to the genre of verbatim and staged at the Moscow Art Theater (author M. Durnenkov, director V. Ryzhakov) for the 150th anniversary of M. Gorky. The relevance of the study is due to the need for further research on the social and aesthetic function of the verbatim - a play created on the basis of editing written documentary sources. A significant difference between the object of study and other forms of the “new drama” is that the verbatim text uses sources from the end of the nineteenth to the beginning of the twentieth centuries. The modern reception of M. Gorky’s personality and work is not represented in it, there are no interviews with the participants of the performance and the audience, which, in general, complicates its perception, but at the same time increases its emotional component. The novelty of the study lies in the fact that for the first time it is indicated on the plot-compositional unity of the text of the play created by editing various documentary sources. The conceptual content of the verbatim “The Sun Rises” is revealed: the formation of the myth of M. Gorky and the artist, who was born in the public mind at the intersection of the writer’s conflicting opinions about himself and his work with assessments of his creative personality by contemporaries and descendants. The object of study was the transcript of the text of the play, which used various types of documentary sources: the correspondence of M. Gorky with correspondents, literary and critical reviews of his works, reflecting the state of literary criticism of a certain historical period, memoirs of contemporaries in which real facts from the life of the writer are included by memoirist in the historical context, as well as fragments of the dramatic works of M. Gorky and his journalism.