Features of using the Pushkin myth in modern drama

Abstract

Based on the material of modern drama in recent years, the article examines the author’s main strategies for working with the Pushkin myth, proving that playwrights use mythologems, images of cultural heroes, and plot situations from the early 19th-century works of the classic as if they were a material containing a code that everyone could understand. Because of this, we note that the authors, not so much update the myth of the poet, as use what already exists and is fixed in the mass consciousness, tending to create an image of a modern person in a situation of self-search. The main mechanism of this search is a dialogue with the other – the poet himself or his characters. The dialogue becomes possible thanks to the authorial strategies of “matching” or “substitution”. As an alternative to Pushkin’s images and the image of the poet himself, a virtual assistant appears in the plays as an achievement of digital civilization. But the modern play shows that a true dialogue and an effective search for answers to questions about oneself are possible only through communication with a real person. Pushkin and his characters, even for the mass consciousness, in which images are often decanonized, are carriers of personal positions that do not become obsolete in modern times as indicated by advertising discourse.