Viktor Sergeevich Rozov
IN good hour!; capercaillie nest
1913–2004
Heroes and time
According to the memoirs of Viktor Sergeevich Rozov, he was told a difficult, but interesting and happy life. And although he did not believe in predictions, he was forced to admit that in March 1949 they began to come true. The play "Her Friends", which the author himself self-critically assessed as "a very thin work", was accepted for staging at the Central Children's Theater. Until that time, the actor of the Kostroma theater, a graduate theater school Rozov has already passed many of the trials that have befallen his generation. At the very beginning of the war, twenty-eight years old, he went to the front as a militia, was seriously wounded. After recovering from his wound, he worked in the front-line theater, composing pieces for concert teams. After the war, Rozov continued his studies, in 1952 he graduated from the Literary Institute. A. M. Gorky, in which he later began to teach, lead a seminar for beginner playwrights.
Rozov's plays - and there are about twenty of them - collectively reflected an entire era, but epic themes, unlike the dramaturgy of the war and post-war years, did not become dominant in his work. Rozov wrote about what Russian classical literature wrote about - about human feelings. He was a fan of the psychological style of Moscow Art Theater, and he managed to return to the stage, and to literature, the psychological drama. His professional interest was focused on the problems of personality, family, ethics, that is, on those eternal values that alone were able to humanize our pragmatic and cruel age.
The heroes of Rozov are direct and pure, in their attitude to the world, naturalness is invariably preserved. Being young and naive, they are always responsible for their decisions in some way unknown to the sophisticated mind. It is difficult for them in a prudent and decrepit society, it is not sweet and lonely for them even in own family. The Pink Boys - that's what they are usually called in critical works - entered the theater stage in the 50s, and it turned out that they were not so strange; on the contrary, they were recognized, the viewer was waiting for them and saw himself in them. Honest and kind, they, however, themselves needed sympathy, not finding it in surrounding reality. Rozov's psychological plays revealed those social diseases that were not customary to talk about and which were perceived by the then society as normal phenomena, as a way of life.
Already Rozov's first play, The Serebrisky Family (1943), which was named "Forever Alive" when published in 1956, spoke about the inherent value of love, personal happiness in a tragic time for the country - the events took place during the years of the Great Patriotic War. The heroic pathos, characteristic of the consciousness of people of that time, did not suppress in the play lyrical theme. Moral compromises, opportunism was opposed true love. The play was based on the traditional antithesis, on which the plots of a great many works of Russian and foreign literature were built.
But Rozov complicated the intrigue, put the heroine in front of a choice, forced her to go down the path of illusions and disappointments. Volunteer Boris goes missing at the front, and his beloved girl Veronika does, as she herself admits, “something terrible”: saving herself, she marries the pianist Mark, Boris’s cousin. Perhaps she, as once Pushkin's Tatyana Larina, after the loss of her beloved, “all lots are equal” became, and she tries to live according to the principle “the habit is given to us from above, it is a substitute for happiness.”
However, love for Boris prevails over the instinct of self-preservation, and the spiritual purity of the heroine prevents further life together with the mercantile, cowardly Mark, for whom the meaning of existence is to survive at any, even the most immoral cost.
In 1957, the Moscow theater-studio Sovremennik opened its first season with a performance based on this play by Rozov directed by Oleg Yefremov. In the same year, director Mikhail Kalatozov and cameraman Sergei Urusevsky filmed based on this play, which received world recognition film "The Cranes Are Flying", awarded at the Cannes Film Festival the highest award- Palme d'Or.
Rozov was primarily concerned with the spiritual being of a young contemporary, penetration into the sphere of his thoughts, emotions, moods, searches, and it was here that he found the origins of dramatic conflicts, socially meaningful and philosophically generalized. Rozovsky plays (one of the critics rightly called them dramas of “the awakening and maturing moral force”) in the highest degree“attentive” to any moments that facilitate movement artistic thought inside and out of the human character.
Following the image of Boris, who died in the war, a whole, open young man, young moral maximalists appear in Rozov's plays, presenting a bill to a society that has forgotten those high moral principles, according to which the hero of "Forever Alive" lived. Being a master psychological drawing, the playwright did not seek to divide his characters into positive and negative. All of his characters could survive moments of weakness, honestly err, make mistakes, but they were never classic "villains". Carriers of certain false life values at the same time, they remained kind, loving and caring people, sincerely believing in their convictions, believing their way of life to be true: they were both prudent and naive at the same time. The playwright preferred antithesis to external conflict, and the problems of plays were clarified by revealing psychological state hero. These features of Rozov's dramaturgy became apparent already in the plays written in the late 40s and early 50s - Her Friends (1949), Life Page (1952), Good Hour! (1954).
In the comedy Good Hour! the playwright puts his young heroes before a choice: school graduates decide who they should be and what they should be. Pink boys are romantics, they are not inclined to the compromises characteristic of older people. Yes, they are naive in their belief in goodness, but Rozov demonstrates their extraordinary moral strength, which should help them grow up, defend their right to trust in themselves, to the purity of their thoughts and desires, and overcome so far unknown difficulties. Young people from intelligent, prosperous families, they do not yet know life, have not experienced its most bitter manifestations.
The action of the play takes place in the apartment of a fifty-year-old doctor. biological sciences Peter Ivanovich Averin. A man of science, he retains a chivalrous attitude towards the ideals of goodness, does not accept the pettiness of his wife Anastasia Efremovna, who successfully arranges a comfortable life for the family and tries, according to notes, through blasphemy, to arrange her in the Bauman School younger son Andrew. With all her might, she strives to ensure that the unlucky son, who does not burden himself with either the worries about his daily bread or the search for his vocation, "would go out into the people." “You will fail in the exams, just know! .. Look, you will be left with nothing, you will go to the factory, to the machine!” - today these motherly "instructions" sound almost like a clumsy parody. But it's not about the anachronistic realities that once determined social status person. Unlike her husband, Anastasia Efremovna is much more pragmatic about modern life, in which loyalty to the Famus principle “to please your dear little man” decides a lot. She lives as she pleases common sense. Grumpy, fussy, crafty, she is at the same time kind, soft-hearted, good hostess, caring wife and mother.
Sudakov's apartment in Moscow. Its owner - Stepan Alekseevich - serves somewhere in the field of work with foreigners. His son Prov is finishing school. Father wants him to enter MGIMO. Daughter Iskra works for a newspaper in the letter department. She is twenty eight years old. She is married. Iskra's husband Georgy (Egor) Samsonovich Yesyunin works with her father.
Prov comes home with his friend Zoya. Zoya's mother is a saleswoman in a stall, and her father is in prison. Prov introduces Zoya to his mother Natalya Gavrilovna. She does not object to such an acquaintance of her son, she is more concerned about Iskra's condition - she has depression after a recent operation, besides, there are some problems with Yegor, which she does not talk about. Iskra takes to heart all the letters that come to the editor, trying to help everyone. Egor believes that you need to be able to refuse.
Stepan Alekseevich returns home with an Italian and an interpreter. The foreigner really wants to look at the life of a "simple Soviet family." Such guests are a common thing with the Sudakovs. After dinner and exchange of souvenirs, the foreigner leaves. Sudakov tells the family the story of his colleague Khabalkin: his son committed suicide. In addition to mental trauma, this means the end of his career for him. Sudakov believes that now he will be appointed to replace Khabalkin. An increase is coming. I have to go to the funeral, but he has things to do, so it would be better for his wife or son to go there. Sudakov, in order to please his son-in-law, tells him that he could also be appointed to Khabalkin's place. He believes that Yegor will go far, over the years he can replace Koromyslov himself. He remembers how quiet, timid and helpful Yegor was when Iskra first brought him into the house.
Unexpectedly, Valentina Dmitrievna arrives. Sudakov hardly remembers that this is his school friend. She is not a Muscovite, she came with a request for help, she is in trouble: her youngest son, a fifth-year student at one of the Tomsk institutes, went to Poland with a group of students. There he fell in love with a Polish girl, did not come to spend the night in a hotel. Naturally, everything became known at the institute, and now Dima is not allowed to defend his diploma. Valentina Dmitrievna, crying, begs Sudakov to help Dima, because after this incident he withdrew into himself, walks gloomy, and she is afraid for him. Sudakov promises to help. Valentina Dmitrievna leaves, leaving a school photo as a keepsake.
Spark goes out for a little walk. Natalya Gavrilovna tells her husband that it seems to her that Yegor is going to leave their house - to leave Iskra. Sudakov is sure that this is all nonsense. He goes to himself.
A very interesting girl comes. Ego Ariadna Koromyslov. She came to Yegor under the pretext of preparing term paper. Natalya Gavrilovna leaves them alone. This is the same girl for whom Yegor is thinking of leaving his wife. Egor tells Ariadne about his past. From childhood, he sought to "crawl up", "break out into the people." And here she is - Iskra. Egor has always been half-starved, almost a beggar, and suddenly there is an opportunity to enter such a family. And of course, he could not miss this opportunity. He marries Iskra. Ariadna wants Yegor to tell his wife everything directly and go to her. Egor promises. Prov catches them kissing. Ariadne leaves. Prov gives Yegor his word not to tell anyone.
Spark returns from a walk. Avoids her husband. Egor thinks that Prov told her something. Spark goes to his father's office, where he keeps a collection of icons, kneels in front of the icons, whispers something. Egor notices this, goes after her father. Sudakov makes a scandal, yells at his daughter. He is afraid that someone will find out that his daughter is praying - then the end of his career. Tries to make her daughter spit on the icons. And here Natalya Gavrilovna cannot stand it. She forces her husband to shut up, and Sudakov obeys. He knows that his wife is Strong woman, strong-willed (from the war she has a medal for courage and two military orders). Natalya Gavrilovna takes Iskra away. Prov kneels before the icons and asks Yegor to die.
May Day morning. Valentina Dmitrievna sent a congratulatory telegram. Dima is not allowed to defend. Prov reproaches his father that he did not help. Yegor says that it was not necessary to violate discipline. The phone rings. Prov picks up the phone. This is Zoya. Prov is going to leave. The father asks who he is going to. Then Prov tells what kind of person Zoya is, from what family. Sudakov is furious. He forbids Prov to communicate with her, but he leaves. Natalya Gavrilovna defends them: she likes the girl. Reminds her husband of Kolya Khabalkin. Zolotarev arrives. This is a young man from Sudakov's work. Zolotarev congratulates Yegor on his appointment to Khabalkin's place. Sudakov has a bad heart: he did not expect Yegor to bypass him at work, and even on the sly. He and his wife move to another room.
Doorbell. The spark opens and returns with Ariadna Koromyslova. Ariadna tells Iskra that Yegor no longer wants to live with them, but wants to marry her, that he never loved Iskra. Iskra calmly listens to all this and warns Ariadne to beware of Yegor: he will wean her from loving everything that she loves now, and if her father’s boss has a daughter, he will calmly exchange Ariadne for her, if it’s better for him. careers. In parting, she warns Ariadne that they will not have children: Yegor recently persuaded her to have a second abortion. Ariadne runs away, asking him not to tell Yegor that she was here.
Enter Sudakov. Natalya Gavrilovna tells him that they had a daughter, Koromyslova, whom Yegor proposed to. For Sudakov, this is a huge shock. Iskra is going to fly to Tomsk to help Valentina Dmitrievna. In the meantime, she wants to move into her parents' rooms, and board up the entrance to Yegor's half.
The phone rings. Sudakov is informed that Prov was taken to the police station because he stole some briefcase. Zoya, who came, says that her mother went to Prova to help out. Indeed, soon Vera Vasilievna brings Prov. In the police station, she knows everyone, and he is released on her word of honor. Sudakov believes that Prov got into the police on purpose to annoy his father. Leaves. Prov says he did it so as not to end up like Kolya Khabalkin. They studied together. That day, Kolya wanted to say something to Prov, but the conversation did not work out. Now Prov blames himself for this.
Prov, Zoya, and Natalya Gavrilovna are carrying Iskra's belongings to them. Egor arrives. He wants to talk to Sudakov about his appointment, but no one wants to talk to him, they don't notice him. Sudakov and his wife are going to visit old friends. At this time, two Negroes with an interpreter come to them. Noticing the black African masks that Sudakov hung instead of icons, the blacks begin to pray.
Viktor Sergeevich Rozov
In a good hour!; capercaillie nest
1913–2004
Heroes and time
According to the memoirs of Viktor Sergeevich Rozov, he was told a difficult, but interesting and happy life. And although he did not believe in predictions, he was forced to admit that in March 1949 they began to come true. The play "Her Friends", which the author himself self-critically assessed as "a very thin work", was accepted for staging at the Central Children's Theater. Until that time, the actor of the Kostroma theater, a graduate of the theater school, Rozov, had already passed many of the trials that befell his generation. At the very beginning of the war, twenty-eight years old, he went to the front as a militia, was seriously wounded. After recovering from his wound, he worked in the front-line theater, composing pieces for concert teams. After the war, Rozov continued his studies, in 1952 he graduated from the Literary Institute. A. M. Gorky, in which he later began to teach, lead a seminar for beginner playwrights.
Rozov's plays - and there are about twenty of them - collectively reflected an entire era, but epic themes, unlike the dramaturgy of the war and post-war years, did not become dominant in his work. Rozov wrote about what Russian classical literature wrote about - about human feelings. He was an admirer of the psychological style of the Moscow Art Theatre, and he managed to bring psychological drama back to the stage, and to literature as well. His professional interest was focused on the problems of personality, family, ethics, that is, on those eternal values that alone were able to humanize our pragmatic and cruel age.
The heroes of Rozov are direct and pure, in their attitude to the world, naturalness is invariably preserved. Being young and naive, they are always responsible for their decisions in some way unknown to the sophisticated mind. It is difficult for them in a prudent and decrepit society, it is not sweet and lonely for them even in their own family. The Pink Boys - that's what they are usually called in critical works - entered the theater stage in the 50s, and it turned out that they were not so strange; on the contrary, they were recognized, the viewer was waiting for them and saw himself in them. Honest and kind, however, they themselves needed sympathy, not finding it in the surrounding reality. Rozov's psychological plays revealed those social diseases that were not customary to talk about and which were perceived by the then society as normal phenomena, as a way of life.
Already the first play by Rozov, The Serebriysky Family (1943), which was named “Forever Alive” when published in 1956, spoke about the inherent value of love, personal happiness in a tragic time for the country - the events took place during the Great Patriotic War. The heroic pathos, characteristic of the consciousness of people of that time, did not suppress the lyrical theme in the play. True love was opposed to moral compromises and opportunism. The play was based on the traditional antithesis, on which the plots of a great many works of Russian and foreign literature were built.
But Rozov complicated the intrigue, put the heroine in front of a choice, forced her to go down the path of illusions and disappointments. Volunteer Boris goes missing at the front, and his beloved girl Veronika does, as she herself admits, “something terrible”: saving herself, she marries the pianist Mark, Boris’s cousin. Perhaps, like Pushkin's Tatyana Larina once, after the loss of her beloved, "all lots are equal" and she tries to live according to the principle "the habit is given to us from above, it is a substitute for happiness."
However, love for Boris prevails over the instinct of self-preservation, and the spiritual purity of the heroine prevents further life together with the mercantile, cowardly Mark, for whom the meaning of existence is to survive at any, even the most immoral cost.
In 1957, the Moscow theater-studio Sovremennik opened its first season with a performance based on this play by Rozov directed by Oleg Yefremov. In the same year, director Mikhail Kalatozov and cameraman Sergei Urusevsky based this play on the world-famous film The Cranes Are Flying, which was awarded the highest award at the Cannes Film Festival - the Palme d'Or.
Rozov was primarily concerned with the spiritual being of a young contemporary, penetration into the sphere of his thoughts, emotions, moods, searches, and it was here that he found the origins of dramatic conflicts, socially meaningful and philosophically generalized. Rozovsky's plays (one of the critics rightly called them dramas of "awakening and maturing moral strength") are extremely "attentive" to any moments that facilitate the movement of artistic thought into and into the depths of human character.
"Capercaillie Nest" by V. Rozov.
Production by V. Pluchek.
Director - S. Vasilevsky.
Artist - I. Sumbatashvili.
Satire Theatre, Moscow, 1980
For six years, the name of V. Rozov was absent from the premieres of the 70s. Rather, V. Rozov participated in the premieres: then the Central Children's Theater will stage old play"On the road", then V. Rozov, a staunch opponent of the transfer of the epic to the stage, will not resist the temptation to write for the same theater a play based on G. Krapivin's story "The Horseman Galloping Ahead". But the theatrical process clearly lacked what was so firmly associated with the name of V. Rozov: burning topicality, almost newspaper efficiency in following reality; there was a lack of keen attention to the inner world of a contemporary, to moral and ethical issues; there was not enough patient and loving looking at a teenager, rebellious, arguing, growing up. And given that the previous plays by V. Rozov - "The Situation" and "Four Drops" - did not bring much success to Moscow theaters and were relatively soon removed from the repertoire (remember how long "In Search of Joy" went on in the Central Children's Theater, "In wedding day" at the Lenin Komsomol Theater, "Traditional Gathering" at Sovremennik, not to mention "Forever Living"), then by the end of the 70s another "small" paradox suddenly emerged. One of the leaders of Soviet drama in the 1950s and 1960s is represented on the capital's billboard with only two performances - the already mentioned "On the Road" and "Forever Alive".
Of course, a holy place does not happen empty, and the absence of V. Rozov was made up for by his "comrades in arms" and younger playwrights who made their debut in this decade, and yet the "rozovsky ferment", his perseverance in defending a position, even sometimes annoying moralizing, was clearly missing. And if the failure of "Four Drops" could be partially explained by the author's excessive exhortation, stubbornly explaining to the reader and the viewer his already clear position, then in the dramas of his followers and students, something else was just alarming: the absence of his own, well-worn view of the problem, hidden behind the external objectivism.
One more thing. In the plays of V. Rozov, there are not only roles, but also characters that captivate the actor. It is interesting to live with their words, thoughts, deeds. Finally, V. Rozov in his original work took a vow of loyalty to the present, referring to the past only in plays based on Goncharov and Dostoevsky. Meanwhile, a remarkable feature of dramaturgy and theater of the late 70s was "temporary nostalgia" - longing for the turn of the 50-60s, when theatrical ideas matured and took shape, groups that determined the face of our theatrical art of recent times, not to mention everyday life , ethical standards, problems and conflicts. Recall" an old house", "adult daughter young man"," Leaving, look back "- plays that either chronologically depict the movement of time from the post-war years to the present, or include dramatic memoirs as a kind of inlay.
Understanding the immediate prehistory, one's roots is an essential feature of the ending cultural cycle and the beginning of a new one. But for a uniform pace, a harmonious movement of culture, a dialectical combination of interests to distant origins, the historical "great time" already described by historians, to the recent past, which is only acquiring the first attempts to define it in formulas that by no means claim to be complete, to the thickness of modernity, is necessary. to an exciting future.
You
Don't read
yourself worthwhile
Only here, in existence,
Present,
Imagine yourself walking
On the edge of the past
with the future.
(L. Martynov)
If we consider V. Rozov's play from the point of view of its role in today's culture, then we can compare it with Trifonov's stories "Exchange" and "Preliminary Results", it is about the life of the urban pseudo-intelligent bourgeoisie. And if in the ten years that have elapsed since the "Exchange" we have become accustomed to reading about it, then we had to look at life in the theater infrequently. And when he appears on the stage, he annoys some, attracts others, attracts, strikes with novelty, but those who, by occupation, are obliged to find an explanation and give a name to the new, have already proposed a name for this phenomenon: "neonaturalism". Meanwhile, what's going on? It's just that in a number of performances of the last two or three seasons, the scene - the apartment - suddenly began to be filled with things familiar to everyday life; if the characters eat and drink in the course of the action, then tables and chairs appeared on the stage, etc. what is it here? How far have we gone from "nature" on the stage, if the mere approximation to it is elevated by criticism to the rank of naturalism? (Once, in response to famous lines Pasternak:
It is impossible not to fall to the end, as in heresy,
In unheard-of simplicity
a shrewd critic, welcoming this call, remarked: "But how must consciousness be confounded ... so that simplicity seems unheard of and is perceived as heresy.")
Being visibly present on the stage, everyday life controls the actions of the characters, reveals the motives of their words and deeds. The underestimation of everyday life is not in the tradition of Russian humanitarian thought. Historian I. Zabelin, a remarkable connoisseur of "home life", wrote about him in the last century: "The conclusions of science, even the events of modern life, reveal more and more every day the truth that a person's home life is an environment in which the germs and rudiments of all the so-called , the great events of his history, the germs and rudiments of his development and all kinds of phenomena of social and political or state life. This is, in the proper sense, the historical nature of man, as strong and as varied in its actions and phenomena as the nature of his physical existence.
Half a century later, the most prominent Soviet historian of literature, G. Gukovsky, saw in "everyday material" that "ideologically substantiates a person and his destiny" as one of the most essential signs of realization.
V. Rozov wrote a play about everyday life as "the historical nature of man", "ideologically substantiating man and his destiny." About life that is unnecessary things, books that are on the shelves, but not readable, icons that are not prayed to and about the aesthetic value of which they heard, but they themselves cannot evaluate, phone calls "the right people", visiting fashionable, prestigious theaters and clubs, exchanging apartments, spare parts and medicines, destroys moral principles, cripples families, spiritually devastates, deprives spiritual sensitivity, dulls the inner hearing (the motive of deafness is present in the very title of the play). And he violently pointed out to us how everyday life sometimes distorts this "historical nature of man," how ideas shrink, and how morality recedes into the background, as if it were something optional, even interfering. a quarter of a century ago with the current prestigious and comfortably furnished office? And not just comfortably, no, but with a claim to culture, to the embodiment of spiritual wealth in household items. And it doesn’t matter that in this office modernity coexists with antiquity, African masks with icons - after all both are expensive and fashionable, which means that the owner keeps pace with the century, not running ahead, but by no means lagging behind him. And it doesn’t matter that the current prestigious library is revered not even by the number of books (not to mention the quality), but by the unwritten, but existing laws of the book market, where prices are set not by bibliophile connoisseurs and not real readers, but by those who confuse Kafka with Camus, but are firmly convinced that the absence of these names in their own library humiliates them human dignity, "people of the latest Pentateuch," as Apollon Grigoriev called this type. famous words"my house is my fortress" suddenly take on a different, gloomy meaning: a fortress as a dungeon, a fortress as enslavement, like bondage. A person becomes a prisoner of his own house, a lackey of his life, which is created in painful rivalry. From the Zhiguli model to the child's stroller, everything becomes a sign of the hierarchical position of their owner, the breadwinner. Thought and will are directed not to creation, but to consumption, creativity is replaced by consumerism.
V. Rozov built this tastelessly luxurious apartment and the characters with whom he populated it, made us live such segments of life before our eyes that we want to break and destroy such a lovingly furnished nest built over the years, to go out on Fresh air. Not from the empty room of the hero of the "UFO", not from the "old house", where you can hear the neighbor rattling the toilet, but from the six-room apartment. Get out, free yourself from the captivity of things and return back to the house to make it habitable for kindness, sensitivity, attention, to change the scale of values, to arrange objects and things according to their true meaning. V. Rozov was silent for six years.
But there is sublime old age,
What menacingly ripens in us
And all the accumulated rage
Saves in reserve
What is waiting for the appointed time
And suddenly throws away the shield.
And pokes at us with the finger of a prophet,
And screams in a hoarse voice.
(D. Samoilov)
Which theater should I send the play to? Any playwright, regardless of age or rank, has this problem. And for someone who has been connected with the theater and theaters for almost a third of a century, it is almost more difficult to solve it than for a beginner. Where could they put the "Capercaillie's Nest"? Ten or fifteen years ago, the answer would have been clear. Well, of course, in Sovremennik, where the role of Sudakov would go to O. Efremov. Let us recall how the actors played for the last time in Efremov's production of V. Rozov's play "From Evening to Noon" six months before O. Efremov's departure. Let us recall the night duet of A. Pokrovskaya and O. Tabakov, the hidden torment of love and pride of I. Kvasha, we recall the intonation of O. Efremov, with which he, who played the role of an elderly unsuccessful writer, uttered the first phrase of his new novel: "Everyone danced." But O. Efremov is not in Sovremennik, last meeting V. Rozov and Sovremennik, apparently, mutually disappointed both, and the Moscow Art Theater, paradoxically, V. Rozov never staged, although Traditional Collection and Four Drops were once included in the repertoire plans.
Well, of course, A. Efros could have taken "The Capercaillie's Nest", but in the 70s he staged "Brother Alyosha" more successfully than "The Situation", and in recent performances far departed not so much from the problems as from the aesthetics of V. Rozov. Well, of course, M. Ulyanov could play Sudakov, but the paths of V. Rozov and the Vakhtangovists crossed only once in the same "Situation" and parted. In a word, the chain of V. Rozov's habitual and, moreover, stable ties with this or that theater has weakened so much that there was no director, no theater for this play, so fundamentally important to V. Rozov (also one of the small paradoxes of the border theatrical situation ). And he gave the play to someone else. Truly, "one's own among strangers, a stranger among one's own."
Why in someone else's? Only because the Theater of Satire and the oldest main director Moscow drama theaters V. Pluchek never staged his plays? No, not only.
Let's take a look at the repertoire poster of the Theater of Satire. Here are the names of modern playwrights: A. Stein, A. Makayonok, A. Arkanov, G. Gorin, M. Roschin, S. Mikhalkov, A. Gelman, S. Aleshin. From each of these playwrights, V. Rozov is fenced off by time, scene of action, everyday material, poetics, aesthetics, language, pathos, the entire dramatic system. Maybe M. Roshchin is closer than others to V. Rozov, but just not with that play, not with "Repair" that is going on in the Theater of Satire. And here are the classics of the Theater of Satire - Molière, Beaumarchais, Griboyedov, Gogol, Mayakovsky, Bulgakov. Of course, "we all came out of Gogol's overcoat," but now we went along these roads quite far and in different sides, so genetically V. Rozov is not derived from any of these playwrights, and the closest to us in time - M. Bulgakov - is not close to V. Rozov " fantastic realism"of their "dreams" from "Running", but rather, the home comfort of the "Turbins". So unusual, unexpected appearance V. Rozov in the context of this poster is not given to prove.
But for V. Pluchek, the choice of the play by V. Rozov seems strange. The main merit of V. Pluchek, his main contribution to the development of the theater of the last quarter of a century is the expansion of the repertory framework, the expansion of the very understanding of satire, its genre variety, combining pathos and ridicule, as if returning to the word its inner form (from the Latin satura - a hodgepodge, mixture) . V. Pluchek with his craving for the grotesque, metaphor, long years estranged from psychologism, translating everyday life into the language of acute theatricality, he never came into contact with the line of literature to which V. Rozov belongs. Meanwhile, the words of I. Solovieva, said twenty years ago about V. Rozov, are true even now: “It would be unusual and embarrassing for a playwright if they decided to put him in an innovative way. It's possible, but it's useless." Noting V. Rozov's love for "everyday details", I. Solovieva wrote at the same time that V. Rozov is "the author of "everyday" and could not live without "everyday" directing. you can’t count it in any way, the performance had to either fail or reveal the “unity of opposites.” Be that as it may, the combination of the names of V. Pluchek and V. Rozov was one of the most interesting tasks, and both venerable artists unexpectedly turned out to be debutants. this riddle V. Pluchek invited the third debutant - one of the most experienced Moscow theater artists I. Sumbatashvili.
I. Sumbatashvili meets V. Rozov for the first time, meets V. Pluchek for the first time. An artist who once took part in performances that were at the forefront of aesthetic quests (" Irkutsk history"," The Death of Ivan the Terrible "), in the works of recent years he has always been highly professional, easily responding to the director's intention: his designs were expressive, theatrical, but the artist seemed to have no direct relation to the disputes about the theater of recent years. Apparently, it was fundamental to perform a new phenomenon for the Theater of Satire, and it took a "triple consonance" of debutantes whitened with theatrical gray hair.
In the order of the eternal universe
There is no stagnation for the living:
In the very law of decay
There are testament updates.
(P. Vyazemsky)
The performance by V. Pluchek and I. Sumbatashvili revives the old theatrical words, which acquire a new meaning: "ensemble", "artistic integrity of the performance", "undercurrent", "subtext", "atmosphere", "pause", etc. With the meticulousness of the early Art Theatre, I. Sumbatashvili outlined the contours of Sudakov's apartment in "Simonov's" handwriting, and the details of household items selected by the artist delight the eye with everyday and social accuracy and recognizability.
Sudakov's study, a spacious dining room, a telephone, furniture, bookshelves, crockery, doors - everything is habitable, everything familiar, everything creates an atmosphere of home. At this table they work, and behind that - "people eat, drink." Here, each thing has its own place, as it happens in inhabited apartments, where there is a housewife, a culinary expert, famous for her "brand" pie. The viewer sees only two rooms, but he is able to imagine the kitchen, and the apartment of the young, and the room of the youngest son, and the bedroom, and the spacious hall, where the door leads to the left of the viewer, from where the visitors of the Sudak "nest" appear. The whole is reconstructed from its parts. And Sudakov's apartment itself is part of a certain social space- as you get acquainted with the way of the house, it turns out to be a small image of the world, a ghostly world, built not on stone, but on sand, but, alas, so seductive and seductive. The metaphorical theater gave way to the "poetry of reality". V. Rozov builds the play on the internal contrast between the imitation of a speech as if recorded on a tape recorder, a slightly obsessive flaunting knowledge of the jargon of the 70s and old dramatic techniques well hidden in the depths of the plot mechanism.
The disease mentioned in the first picture ends in death in the last; family betrayals, unexpected arrivals, scenes of rivals, accidentally overheard conversations, "rhyme-situations", the dramatic effect of deceived expectations, a failed holiday.
The performance is verified and precisely organized in its internal structure, and the viewer experiences theatrical joy, seeing how the improvisational vitality is combined. acting and the director's will, which rallied the text of the playwright and the image of the performance into a single whole.
Not bringing in one's own "image of the world" from outside, imposed by the director and set designer on the playwright, but enriching oneself with the world of another, so rare now - such is the position of the director and artist in relation to the playwright's heroes. This fusion of diverse talents, who sacrificed their theatrical habits, proven techniques for the sake of fidelity to another, for the "convex joy of recognizing" something new, not one's own, for the sake of a stage dialogue - a director with actors, a playwright, an artist with a director and an actor, and everyone together with the audience, gave birth to the special intimate magic of the theatre.
"Modern trends have imagined that art is like a fountain, while it is a sponge. They decided that art should beat, while it should suck and saturate. They considered that it can be decomposed into means of representation, while it is composed of organs of perception. It should always be in the audience and look at everyone cleaner, more receptive and more faithful, but in our days it has known powder, a dressing room, and is shown from the stage ... ". Almost sixty years that have elapsed since Pasternak expressed this point of view have shown that both paths of art are possible - both the "fountain" and the "sponge". The most fruitful periods of culture are when both models work. But now, in the period of the theatrical "interval", the boundary between the almost exhausted cycle of theatrical ideas of the 60s and 70s and the ripening new one, we see that the "fountain" is clearly overcoming the "sponge". From the generosity of the invention of "pictorial means" dazzled in the eyes, and "purity", "fidelity", "susceptibility" are found less and less. "Confessional" poetry, prose, dramaturgy, criticism more and more often look like a sermon, refusing almost the main "genre" feature of confession - the ability to repent, realize one's own sins, retaining only external signs genre. In a word, when the inertia of the charm of previous stage discoveries ends, the poetry of reality, the aesthetic self-denial proclaimed by V. Pluchek, seem fruitful and rejuvenating the face. contemporary theater"productive style" that has not yet been exchanged by epigones and has not yet become a common place for critical skirmishes.
First, the thought is embodied
Into a poet's condensed poem,
Like a young maiden, dark
For inattentive light;
Then, daring, she
Already evasive, eloquent,
Visible from all sides
Like a sophisticated wife
In the novelist's free prose;
Chatterbox old, then,
She, raising a cheeky cry,
Fruits in magazine controversy
It has long been known to all.
(E. Baratynsky)
The fourth volume of the Collected Works of P. A. Markov ends with his program article "Tributaries of a River". The last sentence of the article: "One of the most acute problems now facing the theater is the relationship between the director and the actor." The past five years (the article was published in March 1976) have shown that there really is no more acute problem in the theater today. How does V. Pluchek solve it?
Having trusted the author, V. Pluchek trusted the actors. The actors of the Theater of Satire in the Capercaillie's Nest were not the faceless bearers of the director's ideas. And V. Pluchek did not go along the path of inviting eminent movie stars, poorly ground into a hastily put together ensemble. Of his own "stars", and there are quite a few of them in the theater, V. Pluchek took only two - A. Papanov, T. Vasilyeva. All others or debutants in literally of this word, or V. Pluchek revealed them to us in a new capacity, as a true director-teacher. V. Pluchek cares not about "amplifiers", but about "acoustics". Such directing leads not to "acting arbitrariness", which many theater theorists and practitioners fear, but to the "artistic integrity of the performance", to the fact that the actor makes "the strict performance of the whole whole as if by his own speech," according to Gogol. The holistic, "ensemble" structure of the performance, first of all, changes the ratio of the "center" and "periphery", the main and episodic roles.
In the performance of the Theater of Satire "Woe from Wit" A. Guzenko and S. Tarasova play the Gorich spouses. Here, too, they form a duet, but if the actors remained there minor characters, then in "The Capercaillie's Nest" V. Pluchek seeks to find a psychological and social justification for everyone, speaking in the language of the Moscow Art Theater, he is interested in each participant in the event. All actors get "the right to monologue" regardless of the number of lines. S. Tarasova, translator Julia, with a fixed smile on duty, with a set of language clichés and clichés of behavior, and "charming" Dzirelli - Gouzenko, expansive, mobile - both observe the ritual, the rite, both know how "one should behave." One - to pat the owner's son on the cheek, to be amazed at the generosity and hospitality, to be amiable not to the point of cloying, inquisitive not to the point of tactlessness. The other knows when to take the guest away, to take care that he is not told too much, so that he does not say too much. Both heroes are bright in their average, individual in their typicality. And if at first the viewer follows the "brilliance" Italian A. Guzenko, for his "pronunciation", for solving a technical problem (A. Guzenko does this masterfully), then, getting used to this, the viewer forgets about acting technique, carried away by the full-bloodedness of the image created, sketched right before our eyes. At the same time, the scene is not perceived as an inserted short story, but is included in the structure of the performance.
In the performance there are petrified masks that cover up the ugliness of the spiritual appearance with external respectability. And there are living, human faces - people, and indeed created in the image and likeness of God, even if they do not always live according to the commandments, even if you do not count them among the saints. Running on the way to the May Day demonstration to congratulate a successful colleague on his promotion, Zolotarev (A. Didenko), of course, is a mask. Well-dressed, discreet, laconic, executive. And he slightly lifted the “mask”, opened up a little - it becomes terrible that he will someday take a place where the fate of people will depend on him. And most of all will go to those in front of whom he is forced to put on a mask. In the meantime, in anticipation of a future "wave" that could carry him upstairs, he went to congratulate a colleague, drink a glass of vodka, eat caviar ...
But the saleswoman Vera from a nearby vegetable stall has a face, not a mask. Not an icon, of course, but a face. Slightly flushed on the occasion of the holiday and from the fact that she entered such a house not with a request, but to help out the owner's son - she foolishly got into the police, and she has a district acquaintance, how could a saleswoman not be with a district district acquaintance; so helping out a son is a trifling matter, a couple of trifles, all the more so the debt is red in payment, the boy once protected her daughter from hooligans, and these people, although important, but delicate, and visiting their house is pleasant, and curious, and awkward somehow; and you need to hide your embarrassment by gently shouting at your daughter, they say, don’t stay too long ... Not an icon, and she knows it herself, but a human face.
There is also a mask in the Sudakov family. This is the same Yegor Yasyunin, the idol of his students, an elated superman with a good profile, rising higher and higher through the ranks, before our eyes taking two steps at once on both ladders - official and family, having received a post and left Iskra Sudakova for the daughter of "himself" Koromyslov. Oh, how I would like this step to be the last in the career of Yegor Yasyunin!
His debutant G. Martirosyan is playing, playing, accurately drawing the type of the Yasyunins, his irresistibly acting charm of "his boyfriend". "His" with his boss, with his mother-in-law, with his father-in-law, with students, completely devoid of shame - a regulator of behavior, sincere in his animal cunning, an ingenuous seducer who captivated not only the foolish Ariadne, who deceived not only the compassionate Iskra, who saw in him a version of the destitute (but who wasn’t littered with literary clichés, and only Pushkin’s Tatiana had to wonder: “Isn’t he a parody”, although the current Childe Harold is not hiding behind a cloak, he has a set of different costumes in his wardrobe, and if Ariadna Koromyslova is attracted to “suede jackets”, then Iskra , on the contrary, we need a defenseless, weak, who can be fed, dressed up, who needs to create comfort). And here's how he braided Sudakov, a grated kalach who understands people!
A. Papanov plays Sudakov in such a way that the question of whether his hero is good or bad is inappropriate. Well, of course, he is good, he does not do evil, but no, no, he will do good. And that the "world" of his house "lies in evil", that his son-in-law is a bastard, that his daughter is tormented, that he is looking for the meaning of life, and that Prov's son does not accept ready, that for others conscience has become a convention, that telephone communication for obtaining life's blessings has become, in his own words, "the second signal system"(the old man with humor) - he does not notice this, because "they took a good pace of life." And only when he was bypassed by the rank, when not someone else's son, but his Proshka, got into the police, when his husband left Iskra - that's when the capercaillie -Really "felt the heart for the first time."
For a long time A. Papanov did not play a contemporary, the viewer remembers him as Gorodnichiy, Famusov, Khludov, and here Papanov plays without a gap between him and time, knowing his hero closely, knowing the everyday details of his behavior. He loves his home and how he rejoices on May Day, that for once you can sit with your friends at a tasty and plentiful table, and drink a glass of vodka not with strangers, where you need to hang on, but among loved ones, where, if a little bit, and carry , no problem. Only Sudakov didn’t drink, he didn’t have a holiday, his heart ached ... And suddenly he somehow becomes smaller, his facial features are sharper, he is helpless, he fusses, but only interferes, and then another delegation with an interpreter, again Sudakov represents family, shows the apartment. The words and gestures are those of the former Sudakov, but the intonations are new, lively, uncertain, tired, human...
T. Vasilyeva also appeared in a new capacity. The role of Iskra turned out to be exactly the role where inner world naked before the viewer - not in screams and tears, but in mute grief, bitterness from a broken, if not forever, then for a long time, life. And this grief - not in irritation, not in anger, not in the wounded pride of an abandoned wife - this is grief pure man, insulted by lies, dirt, humiliated by untruth. And like any genuine sorrow, the sorrow of the Spark awakens responsiveness, the ability to sympathize, feel the pain of others, physical affinity with those who are now feeling bad.
The end of the first act, when Iskra, in the dim light of a table lamp, quietly, unexpectedly for herself, kneels before Sudak's "iconostasis" and clumsily prays, not knowing whom and what to ask, what to repent of, but knowing that without this there is no strength to live when the age-old sadness of the "seduced and abandoned" is read in the big eyes of the actress - perhaps the best thing that T. Vasilyeva has done on stage so far is a promise of the future.
And at the same time, behind all the images, large and small, the director's pointer did not peep out, obscuring the author and the actors - the director died in the actor, according to famous expression Vl. I. Nemirovich-Danchenko, and the actors "died in the play", but much less famous saying the same Vl. I. Nemirovich-Danchenko. But this death is like the death of a grain that germinates and gives new shoots, a new quality.
Doors slam in Sudakov's apartment, life bursts imperiously into the house with its pain and joys ... The wind blows through the "capercaillie's nest", blows away all life's rubbish, everything that has eaten into cracks and corners, everything that closes the human essence, the grain of personality. ..
According to the memoirs of Viktor Sergeevich Rozov, he was told a difficult, but interesting and happy life. And although he did not believe in predictions, he was forced to admit that in March 1949 they began to come true. The play "Her Friends", which the author himself self-critically assessed as "a very thin work", was accepted for staging at the Central Children's Theater. Until that time, the actor of the Kostroma theater, a graduate of the theater school, Rozov, had already passed many of the trials that befell his generation. At the very beginning of the war, twenty-eight years old, he went to the front as a militia, was seriously wounded. After recovering from his wound, he worked in the front-line theater, composing pieces for concert teams. After the war, Rozov continued his studies, in 1952 he graduated from the Literary Institute. A. M. Gorky, in which he later began to teach, lead a seminar for beginner playwrights.
Rozov's plays - and there are about twenty of them - collectively reflected an entire era, but epic themes, unlike the dramaturgy of the war and post-war years, did not become dominant in his work. Rozov wrote about what Russian classical literature wrote about - about human feelings. He was an admirer of the psychological style of the Moscow Art Theatre, and he managed to bring psychological drama back to the stage, and to literature as well. His professional interest was focused on the problems of personality, family, ethics, that is, on those eternal values that alone were able to humanize our pragmatic and cruel age.
The heroes of Rozov are direct and pure, in their attitude to the world, naturalness is invariably preserved. Being young and naive, they are always responsible for their decisions in some way unknown to the sophisticated mind. It is difficult for them in a prudent and decrepit society, it is not sweet and lonely for them even in their own family. The Pink Boys - that's what they are usually called in critical works - entered the theater stage in the 50s, and it turned out that they were not so strange; on the contrary, they were recognized, the viewer was waiting for them and saw himself in them. Honest and kind, however, they themselves needed sympathy, not finding it in the surrounding reality. Rozov's psychological plays revealed those social diseases that were not customary to talk about and which were perceived by the then society as normal phenomena, as a way of life.
Already the first play by Rozov, The Serebriysky Family (1943), which was named “Forever Alive” when published in 1956, spoke about the inherent value of love, personal happiness in a tragic time for the country - the events took place during the Great Patriotic War. The heroic pathos, characteristic of the consciousness of people of that time, did not suppress the lyrical theme in the play. True love was opposed to moral compromises and opportunism. The play was based on the traditional antithesis, on which the plots of a great many works of Russian and foreign literature were built.
But Rozov complicated the intrigue, put the heroine in front of a choice, forced her to go down the path of illusions and disappointments.
Volunteer Boris goes missing at the front, and his beloved girl Veronika does, as she herself admits, “something terrible”: saving herself, she marries the pianist Mark, Boris’s cousin. Perhaps, like Pushkin's Tatyana Larina once, after the loss of her beloved, "all lots are equal" and she tries to live according to the principle "the habit is given to us from above, it is a substitute for happiness."
However, love for Boris prevails over the instinct of self-preservation, and the spiritual purity of the heroine prevents further life together with the mercantile, cowardly Mark, for whom the meaning of existence is to survive at any, even the most immoral cost.
In 1957, the Moscow theater-studio Sovremennik opened its first season with a performance based on this play by Rozov directed by Oleg Yefremov. In the same year, director Mikhail Kalatozov and cameraman Sergei Urusevsky based this play on the world-famous film The Cranes Are Flying, which was awarded the highest award at the Cannes Film Festival - the Palme d'Or.
Rozov was primarily concerned with the spiritual being of a young contemporary, penetration into the sphere of his thoughts, emotions, moods, searches, and it was here that he found the origins of dramatic conflicts, socially meaningful and philosophically generalized. Rozovsky's plays (one of the critics rightly called them dramas of "awakening and maturing moral strength") are extremely "attentive" to any moments that facilitate the movement of artistic thought into and into the depths of human character.
Following the image of Boris, who died in the war, a whole, open young man, young moral maximalists appear in Rozov’s plays, presenting an account to a society that has forgotten the high moral principles by which the hero of “Forever Living” lived. Being a master of psychological drawing, the playwright did not seek to divide his characters into positive and negative ones. All of his characters could survive moments of weakness, honestly err, make mistakes, but they were never classic "villains". The carriers of certain false life values remained at the same time kind, loving and caring people, sincerely believing in their convictions, believing their way of life to be true: they were both prudent and naive at the same time. The playwright preferred antithesis to external conflict, and the problems of plays were clarified by revealing the psychological state of the hero. These features of Rozov's dramaturgy became apparent already in the plays written in the late 40s and early 50s - Her Friends (1949), Life Page (1952), Good Hour! (1954).
In the comedy Good Hour! the playwright puts his young heroes before a choice: school graduates decide who they should be and what they should be. Pink boys are romantics, they are not inclined to the compromises characteristic of older people. Yes, they are naive in their belief in goodness, but Rozov demonstrates their extraordinary moral strength, which should help them grow up, defend their right to trust in themselves, to the purity of their thoughts and desires, and overcome so far unknown difficulties. Young people from intelligent, prosperous families, they do not yet know life, have not experienced its most bitter manifestations.
The action of the play takes place in the apartment of the fifty-year-old doctor of biological sciences Pyotr Ivanovich Averin. A man of science, he retains a chivalrous attitude towards the ideals of goodness, does not accept the pettiness of his wife Anastasia Efremovna, who successfully arranges a comfortable family life and tries, according to notes, to get her youngest son Andrei into the Bauman School. With all her might, she strives to ensure that the unlucky son, who does not burden himself with either the worries about his daily bread or the search for his vocation, "would go out into the people." “You will fail in the exams, just know! .. Look, you will be left with nothing, you will go to the factory, to the machine!” - today these motherly "instructions" sound almost like a clumsy parody. But it's not about the anachronistic realities that once determined a person's social status. Unlike her husband, Anastasia Efremovna is much more pragmatic about modern life, in which loyalty to the Famus principle “to please your dear little man” decides a lot. She lives as common sense dictates. Grumpy, fussy, crafty, she is at the same time kind, soft-hearted, a good housewife, a caring wife and mother.
Already the first author's remark introduces us to a prosperous family atmosphere: despite all the difficulties, " housing issue» The Averins live in a new house, they even have a dining-living room furnished with solid furniture. In general, life is perceived by Rozov not just as the natural basis of human existence, in his view it is a tool for testing heroes for moral strength, gives him the opportunity to impartially judge the level of their moral criteria.
Following the traditions of Ostrovsky's dramaturgy, Rozov creates characters largely by describing everyday life, including detailed remarks. Thus, introducing the reader and the viewer into the world of Anastasia Efremovna, he pays special attention to material details, lists many interior items: there is a large clock, and a piano, and a chandelier, and a comically played up, exotic ashtray sink (in a house where no one smokes ).
Further remarks and dialogues include detailed indications of what the characters eat, how they close the door, what they take out of their pockets, etc. tie. But this real detail, which prompts the heroes to shower each other with reproaches, thereby allows us to define them " pain points”- one has a “party on his mind”, the other is burdened by the position of an unsuccessful actor.
Through numerous attributes of the everyday environment, the playwright reveals all the diversity of various social and personal ties, one way or another influencing spiritual state heroes. In the play "Good afternoon!" a passion for materialism, for well-being at any cost, is directly opposed to kindness. Pyotr Ivanovich says to his wife: “When we lived in the same room, you were somehow kinder, Nastya.” The past for which the characters are nostalgic is presented good peace where the unmercenaries lived. And Andrei, in reproach to the well-fed, well-to-do present, recalls the war years that he spent with Siberian relatives: “I don’t remember anything, only log walls and clocks ... They ticked softly ...”
Memories of father and son reinforce the motive of discord, the unrighteous life of the Averins. The characters appear on the scene as if by the way, their presence is not motivated by the previous episode and is not connected with the storylines of other characters. They entered this clean apartment as if by chance, and no one cares about anyone else, except for Anastasia Efremovna, whose concern for her sons takes on an ugly form.
The peace of the family is disturbed by two circumstances: Andrei passes the entrance exams to the Bauman School and the nephew of Averin Sr. Alexei, also an applicant, arrives from Siberia. In the system of characters in Rozov's plays, there are practically no heroes who repeat each other with their life experience and views. Andrei and Alexei are almost the same age, but if the first is infantile, then the second is reasonable, independent, responsible for his actions and decisions. Alexei grew up without a father, was brought up in a large family, combined his studies at school with work at a sawmill, in workshops, and cleaned sidewalks. These life difficulties tempered his character, contributed to his rapid spiritual maturity.
Andrei has a different fate, whose image has become a real artistic discovery of the playwright. Unlike other characters, he has not yet realized himself, his character has not been formed. In the charming, full of spiritual warmth and spontaneity, the figure of this boy combines childish mischief and inquisitive activity of a sharp, hard-working thought, the naive cockiness of many reasonings and a romantically inspired dream of a real business in life, pretense of swagger and hidden inner purity and decency, organic contempt to vulgarity, to falsehood in any of its guises.
Andrei is invariably cheerful and ironic, but his mockery has nothing to do with empty malice, the feigned skepticism of a young, but already disappointed soul. On the contrary, a lively word, and a witty joke, and caustic reproaches, and an unfeigned denunciation of posturing and fashion - all this helps him to remain himself, to be always cheerful, cheerful and maintain optimism, which not only is not opposed to irony, but is largely supported by it. and is checked.
The character of Andrei, presented in development, is most interesting to the playwright, who made this particular character the main character. Andrei childishly protests against materialism, opportunism, rationality of his mother. His nihilistic maximalism is shocking: "Sometimes I want to walk through our clean rooms and spit in all corners ..." that after the institute he will settle in Moscow.
He agrees to take the recommendation note to the dean (“Consider that I ended up in Baumanskoye”), but he, tormented by remorse, tears it up. Alexei's question addressed to Andrey: "... are you a calf or a vile soul?" - is caused primarily by the sincerity of the protagonist: he does not hide his doubts and throwings from anyone.
In Andrey, two principles seem to be fighting - high, paternal, and unworthy, pragmatic, perceived from his mother. However, behind Andrey's external infantilism, lightness, unscrupulousness, there is an adult feeling: “Do you think you are a cheerful fool? It’s like that… Tosca.” It is this dissatisfaction with oneself that is perhaps the most valuable quality of the Rozovsky hero. The conflict within the personality is more attractive to the playwright than the conflict of personalities.
Rozov introduces a social motive into the family plot: Andrey also protests against hypocrisy, which has become the norm of the then public life. He does not accept the hypocrisy cultivated in the Komsomol: the school staff unanimously “worked through” him for his non-Komsomol attitude to his participation in the life of the country - and he just honestly admitted that he did not know who he wanted to be.
The demagogy and careerism of a typical graduate of the capital's Komsomol are manifested in the image of Vadim, Andrei's friend. According to Anastasia Efremovna, he is always "tight", "tidy, polite, and even smart." His speech is replete with stamped phrases - "agitation" like "in our time, learning to play is unworthy", "in any profession you can vegetate and you can become a person." Speaking with aplomb about a big dream, about duty, about perseverance and perseverance in achieving a goal, and other lofty matters, he remarks: “It seems that we were taught this at school and in the Komsomol organization.”
Unlike Andrei, Vadim does not have any doubts about his path in life, because his moral credo is quite determined: being the son of a famous academician, he hopes, not without reason, to easily get into the prestigious Institute of Foreign Trade chosen by him through his father's patronage. Moreover, he prudently and cynically plans his life for many years to come.
Rozov here seems to refer us to the moral problems of classical works of XIX century, introducing the motif of "an extraordinary personality" and "mere mortals" into the play. A student of the capital's Komsomol, after graduating from high school, does not intend to "get lost in the position of some clerk in the ministry" and expects to work in the countries of the capitalist West.
There is no external, obvious conflict in the play. True, with the figures of Vadim and Alexei, standing at opposite moral "poles", Rozov created the possibility of building a dramatic conflict in the form of an open, naked clash, but did not use it to the fullest extent. A purposefully developing struggle between these characters does not actually occur during the course of the stage action. They only come face to face in one episode, when shy, modest Alexey, outraged by Vadim's boastful and demagogic chatter, changed his usual restraint and "exploded" ("You have no honor, conscience. You scoundrel!"). This fight does not receive further continuation in the plot, but it is most directly reflected in the fate of Andrei. It is, as it were, projected onto the inner world of the protagonist, which becomes a real arena for the manifestation of all its consequences. For Vadim and Aleksey do not change, they remain antipodes even after a collision with each other. Andrei is changing, his healthy moral principles are being strengthened.
And the plot, which obeys the laws of the comedy genre, is not dramatic: the young man did not go to college and left for the provinces ... Characters appear and disappear on the stage who speak equally about trifles and fateful problems, and it is in these conversations that and not in the drama of the circumstances lies dramatic essence plays, characters are revealed. But, developing the theme of life values, the meaning of human existence, and without resorting to the irreconcilable struggle of his characters, Rozov brings their endless conversations about this and that to an unexpected, not plot-motivated act of the protagonist - and this act concentrates the entire meaning of the play. There is practically no plot, and the culmination falls on the finale.
"Good afternoon!" ends on an optimistic note, high morality wins in the finale. Andrei performs a worthy action, crossing out his prosperous and irresponsible life. The plot is built, as it were, on the reverse situation: at the beginning of the play, Alexei arrives in Moscow, at the end of it, Andrei refuses to take a decisive exam, leaves a comfortable metropolitan apartment and leaves with Alexei for Siberia, thereby following in the footsteps of his father, who began his working life laborer. Andrey's last stage word: "Let's go!" expresses the playwright's belief in his character. And there is no denouement in the truest sense of the word. At one time, Gogol argued that The Inspector General was a play without end. Rozovsky plays often end with the beginning of a new stage in the fate of the hero, and they, too, seem to have no end.
As a rule, Rozov's stage action does not focus on one character, which makes his dramaturgy related to Chekhov's. He is equally interested in all the characters, they are valuable in themselves, their storylines are not in subordination with the fate of the chief actor. In the comedy Good Hour! its own stage life Aleksey and Vadim live, and Andrey's girlfriend Galya, and his brother, the actor Arkady, who has his own problems not only with his girlfriend and mother, but above all with himself. He lives by inertia, is not satisfied with his work in the theater, loses faith in his vocation. Andrey calls him a loser, and Masha, his beloved - a character of a clearly moralistic plan, a spokesman for the author's assessments - tells him: "You have lost your taste for life, you began to love yourself, and not art - that's it taking revenge on you!" But Arkady nevertheless overcomes his doubts, he is convinced that the theater, the roles are his life. He gains a second wind and also finds himself on the threshold of new achievements.
Material wealth, career ups, social prestige - these are values that have become a priority, significant in the post-war urban environment. Demanded in the social atmosphere that Rozov recreates, they are organically not accepted by his young heroes, who are not inclined to oppose the crushed world with pathetic speeches, lofty slogans, moral sermons and reject them with all their nature, nature, consciousness.
The action of the play "In Search of Joy" (1957) takes place, as in other works of Rozov, in a city apartment, conflicts unfold in the family. The image of the student high school Oleg Savin, who mutilated new furniture with his father's saber - a symbol of bourgeois life, hoarding, acquisitiveness in conditions of total shortages and queues - became for contemporaries a sign of the times, a reminder of the true meaning of life. On the whole, it corresponded both to the ideals of people who remembered the war and to officially promoted Soviet morality.
Appears in the play villain, and the plot is based on external conflict: Oleg and Lenochka, the wife of his older brother Fyodor and a successful acquirer, act as antagonists in relation to each other. Lenochka is shown as a very enterprising and mercenary person, no one loves her, except for her husband, whom she contemptuously calls mediocrity and a rag, and the author practically leaves the viewer no opportunity to be indulgent towards her. As for Oleg, who calls Lenochka a chicken in his heart, he acts like a moral maximalist, brought up on Mayakovsky: his brother’s notorious furniture is as unbearable for him as a petty-bourgeois canary for a poet (the poem “On Rubbish”), and if there was a call to turn heads canaries for the sake of a brighter future, then the young man's eccentric act has a moral justification. Ultimately, Oleg's ethical rigor and intolerance are generated by time to the same extent as Lenochka's materialism - both characters reflect the extremes of public morality.
There is no edification, moralizing in the play, just as there is no traditional denouement, in which the right and the wrong would be revealed. Rozov does not pass judgment on his heroes, but it is obvious that the author's sympathies are on Oleg's side. Unlike Andrei Averin, he does not undergo noticeable moral transformations in the course of the dramatic action, but what he already possesses - straightforwardness, uncompromisingness and honesty, rejection of acquisitive aspirations - is for the playwright the key to the spiritually meaningful future path of his hero.
Oleg's extravagant trick in itself does not predetermine anything in the fate of the characters, does not cut the multi-layered conflict knot that has begun in their relationship with each other (although it noticeably activates dramatic action, informs him of that sharpness, tension, which was not in the comedy "Good afternoon!" with its soft, restrained ironic-humorous tone and the absence of action-packed plot points). Stage circumstances create
extremely tense atmosphere in the house, when one way or another the moral possibilities of different characters should be revealed, each of which finds himself in a situation of choice.
