Никто из авторов не предлагает упрощенного выхода из сети обмана и самообмана, в которой запутались и герои и, порой, путается читатель. Но не в этом дело — вызывая в читателе сомнения и подталкивая его к размышлениям, авторы заявляют о своей принадлежности к лучшим традициям Петербургской литературы.
В одной из статей Иосиф Бродский писал, что Петербург, будучи для первых его русских писателей вроде бы нерусским городом, дал им возможность посмотреть на окружающий мир отчужденным критическим взглядом. Мне кажется, что авторы настоящего сборника продолжают смотреть на свой город таким же взглядом — одновременно изнутри и со стороны.
Katharine Hodgson
доктор филологии Кембриджского университета
историк русской литературы
My first acquaintance with St Petersburg was through literature: seen from a distance, the city seemed to be the setting for extraordinary dramas in which the characters were reduced to incomprehension and despair by encounters either with their own nose or with themselves in the form of a double. My first real sight of St Petersburg, or rather, with Leningrad, as the city was then called, took place a few years later during the latter phase of perestroika, but its spirit already seemed familiar to me.
In my view (the view of someone looking in from the outside) this collection, in its very essence, captures a quality which is ty l of St Petersburg. It does not matter that some of the plays in this volume are not set in St Petersburg or even in Russia. Nor does it matter that the plays cover a wide thematic range: here you will find contemporary Russia and the Soviet past, political questions and the writer’s predicament, new technology and the complexities of personal relationships. Even though the plays in this collection cover such varied ground, they are all connected by a common thread which links them to the particular tradition of St Petersburg literature established by Gogol. At the end of his story «Nevskii Prospekt» the author advises his reader to beware the city’s main thoroughfare, where: «all is deception, all is a dream, nothing is what it appears to be». Night is even more terrifying, a time «when the demon himself illuminates the lamps for the sole purpose of revealing everything in a false light».
The authors of «New Petersburg Drama», in one way or another, break down the familiar and comfortable idea that there is only one unambiguous version of reality.
The main character in Sergei Nosov’s play takes his visitor to be someone other than who he actually is. The author then leaves us to face the question of whether his hero’s fanaticism has gone over into fantasy.