Performing Suicide: Transformation of the Superfluous Man in Soviet Drama

Maksimovich, Polina A

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-886b-qa89

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Performing Suicide: Transformation of the Superfluous Man in Soviet Drama

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In my dissertation, I unveil a concept of the dramatic protagonist in Soviet drama that I propose to call a modern superfluous man. To note, this is not an attempt to trace the entirety of the superfluous man tradition from its origins to the present but rather a selective consideration, confined to the examination of two periods in the development of Russia—the 1920s and the ‘60s-‘70s—when Soviet society was undergoing great ideological battles. My research focuses on the three distinctive twentieth-century plays by Iurii Olesha, Nikolai Erdman, and Aleksandr Vampilov that showcase major developments in Soviet drama and theater and represent shifting conceptions of selfhood in Soviet cultural discourse. Colin Wright in his 1988 article “‘Superfluous People’ in the Soviet drama of the 1920s” already applies this term to the Soviet context, identifying “superfluous” characters as socially useless individuals, deeply flawed in a moral sense. I further build on this comparison to develop a more comprehensive concept based on Olesha’s metaphor of the beggar in relation to the dramatic hero. My project, however, is essentially different in approach and focus: I refer to the superfluous man as a literary trope and an apt metaphor to draw typological parallels with the image of a social outcast in Soviet Russia and do not look for weak-willed and ineffectual heroes in the twentieth-century drama. Rather, I aim to define conceptually this qualitatively new character who emerged out of the transformed environment in the 1920s and was made into a ‘beggar.’ In my analysis, I go outside the framework of the literary hero and also explore his real-life prototype—the role of the artist in society and the autonomy of creative practice in the new historical context, when “art directly merged with politics.” Specifically, my dissertation focuses on the use of fake suicide as a dramatic and theatrical device for character development, which results in the figurative death of the protagonist who functions as the author’s projection of the self. This cultural phenomenon could be called, to paraphrase Svetlana Boym, suicide in quotations marks. Further adopting Boym’s metaphor, my intention, similarly, is to “reopen, or make visible the numerous quotation marks” around the word suicide through the lens of performance. The performative aspect of fake suicide in drama is a new topic in literary studies that has not been previously pursued in the vein of tragicomedy and romantic grotesque. The three plays under discussion were widely studied by scholars but not in the context of authorial mischief, subversive self-identity. At the same time, underneath the concept of fake suicide, as I see it, lays a generic feature of Soviet culture, which was inspired by the conflict of identity in the Soviet period and points to the implied connection between the literary fate of the author and his text in the Soviet Union.

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