WAR, MEMORY, THEATER IN THE PLAY OF ALEKSANDR VITЕR “SUNSUDENTLY QUIET”

Abstract

Oleksandr Vitеr’s play “Unexpectedly Quiet” is a modern dramaturgical experimental text that offers the recipients to think about the Russian aggression against Ukraine as a chance for Ukrainians to find their true selves as much as possible, but in an artistic format, as far as possible from the realities of the actual war. The playwright actualizes only such allusions to war as the closed space of the bomb shelter as a perimeter of temporary impasse and the sound accompaniment created by distant explosions. This really gives him the opportunity to talk not so much about the war itself, but about the new semantic planes of Ukrainian culture activated by it, which is included in the formation of modern civic identity and only after the beginning of fullscale aggression begins to actively work in the field of self-awareness, memory, and collective trauma. To do this, the playwright offers to count from a “clean sheet”, which allows him to create a dense and potential work of art in the concentrated format of a one-act play. Objective – to analyze Oleksandr Vitеr’s play “Unexpectedly Quietly” in the context of modern memory studies and to reveal the intertextual levels of its subtext given the author’s stated intention to completely “erase” memory. Methods: memory studies, trauma studies, postcolonial studies in aspects of identification/identity. Results. The playwright develops a new model of a bomb shelter relevant for the Ukrainian drama of 2022, on the one hand, as a construction of a closed and potentially dangerous space for the heroes, which significantly and irreversibly changes people and makes all their previous life experience irrelevant, which in the play is materialized by the metaphor of “empty pages” in numerous books available to the protagonist in the shelter. On the other hand, the interaction with the Other person in this very space clearly shows the need for a new self-awareness and rejection of the former self, as well as the construction of oneself anew, which is possible only together with “his” people. Despite the fact that the topos of the bomb shelter serves as a universal model of stage space for many modern Ukrainian playwrights (Olexandr Havrosh, Inna Goncharova, Nina Zahozhenko, Artem Lebedev, Lena Lyagushonkova, Oleksiy Minko, Neda Nezhdana, Yuliya Nechai, Iryna Serebryakova, etc.), in each specific case its deployment is quite specific. For Oleksandr Vitеr, it becomes a space for existential questions and the search for answers to them with the help of the memory of sensations and the memory of the body, senseless intellectual-emotional competitions caused by the war of bright emotional swings, the conscious right to any demonstration of one’s anxiety and to attempts to appease. The “laws of the genre” are the means of a certain emotional “detachment” for the characters, according to which banal classical literary plots are built, and with the help of this “detachment” they seek to organize their own emotional sphere and make sure that there is a life perspective outside the bomb shelter, in the end, they verbalize their own conviction, that the performatively created stage characters are able to bring them “to the light”. Conclusions. Oleksandr Viter demonstrates that war can be artistically interpreted through metonymic practices, without describing its realities and the characters’ emotional reactions to them directly. His war, on the one hand, is very global and completely changes the characters’ perception of themselves, de-actualizing their previous life experiences. On the other hand, in the play, the war exists remotely, somewhere outside, and in front of the recipients of the work, the space of the bomb shelter turns not into a place of passive hiding of people, but into a field of active work with memory, trauma and own identity. This makes the text of the drama “Unexpectedly Quiet” open to a wide variety of theatrical and cultural interpretations.