RESEARCH STRATEGY OF POLITICAL TIME AND SPACE IN MODERN DRAMA
The article discusses political time and space as objects of playwrights’ artistic interpretation of reality in the early twenty-first century. This work focuses on plays of different genres: those based on literary fiction and having a documentary basis. Playwrights’ interest in the study of political space and time is determined by the general politicization of art in Russia in the early twenty-first century. Due to a special nature of modern drama such interpretations are rather sociological than aesthetic by nature. Consequently, political time and political space, being the phenomena of social consciousness, are chosen as study units. These units have been represented in a special way in the artistic consciousness of playwrights over the years. Thus, in V.Teterin’s play “Putin.doc” (2005), political time is perceived saturated with absurd events and political space is seen as a result of a symbolic appropriation of alien space by political actors. In a dramatic pamphlet by D.Bykov (2009), our present political time is characterized as mythological and materialized with the author's strategy aiming to deconstruct the myth. While political space is represented as a product of the functioning of social institutions in a private space of apartments and virtual media space. The play of A.Rodionov and E.Troepolskaya “The Project "Swan"” (2013) examines political space as a concept of struggle between social worlds. This concept, generated by speech formulas and enshrined in language, makes a person take sides. The paper draws conclusions about playwrights’ progress in their understanding of political time and space: from the ridicule and provocation to searching personal space inside the political one.