Art and life in E. Radzinsky’s play “The Executioner, or Conversations on the Way to the Guillotine”: The problem of boundaries

   The article deals with the problem of the boundary as an aesthetic and ontological component of plotbuilding in E. Radzinsky’s play “The Executioner, or Conversations on the Way to the Guillotine”. In all Radzinsky’s plays, regardless of the subject matter and genre characteristics, there are, as it were, two spaces: the external attitude to the character (in this case, the space of historical precedents) and the internal one, the space of moral choice, the existential one. The displacement or destruction of the boundaries of these spaces, the overcoming of “dualism”, to which the character of the play is doomed, creates the specifics of the conflict and its implementation in the plot of the play. In E. Radzinsky’s plays-parables, where the text is organized with the help of a reliable or unreliable historical document, contradictions of the personal order are projected onto the world order of society. In the play “The Executioner, or Conversations on the Way to the Guillotine”, E. Radzinsky creates a text organized by expanding it with other texts, which allows him to expose and remove the boundaries between fiction and authenticity, between the reflection of art and life in the play. This projection doubles in the play chosen for our analysis: the events of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the “great terror” are revealed based on the events of the Great French Revolution and its “great terror”. Thus, in the play under consideration, “a text within a text” technique is used, which creates numerous combinations, intersections and collisions of semiotic meanings that multiply and complicate the concept of boundaries. A text frame can be the unifying and structuring principle of such a mosaic text. The semantic framework of the play is the story of Meyerhold and Zinaida Reich’s last days. Thus, we can say that the playwright first creates and then destroys the boundaries between a historical document and a historical hoax, between art and reality.

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