The Topos of Memory in A. V. Vampilov’s Dramaturgy

Abstract

The relevance of the topic of the article is largely determined by stereotypical judgments about the philosophic nature of the Russian literary tradition, the inclusion of the issues raised in the problems of constantly renewed disputes about the loss of this quality in the era of socialist realism, discussions about the historical and literary status of the “Bronze Age”, when the leaders of the literary process, contrary to the already established ideas about the “thaw era”, the traditionalist writers have become the same. The author focuses on the plays of the outstanding Russian playwright Alexander Vampilov. The analytical approach is based on the topical analysis of the literary text. Topos is considered as a “structural and semantic model” (P. E. Bukharkin, I. V. Annenkova, etc.), which in the case of Vampilov has several levels of textual embodiment: the “genetic roof” of the character’s name, during the creation of which the artist restored the ancient Russian Orthodox tradition of naming; the memory motif, fixinga multi‑stage process of loss and restoration of memories; foreign genre inclusions, in particular, in the text of the play “Last Summer in Chulimsk”, the playwright used the genre of legend as a form of existence of national memory. The main conclusion: the most complex literary topos of memory, the variability of which does not prevent us from presenting the national mentality as a kind of integrity formed under the influence of the Orthodox tradition, is presented in the creative heritage of A. V. Vampilov as a special type of moral imperative, the semantic structure of which is determined by the national (historical, cultural) and personal memory, which illuminated the life of a Russian person at all times, even in the Soviet era, which is considered to be indiscriminately atheistic.