The conflict of a play, as a rule, is not identical to some kind of life conflict in its everyday form. He generalizes and typifies the contradiction that the artist, in in this case playwright, observes life. The depiction of a particular conflict in a dramatic work is a way of revealing social contradiction in an effective fight.
While remaining typical, the conflict is at the same time personified in a dramatic work in specific characters and is “obvious.”
Social conflicts depicted in dramatic works, naturally, are not subject to any unification in content - their number and variety are limitless. However, the methods of compositionally building a dramatic conflict are typical. Reviewing the existing dramatic experience, we can talk about the typology of the structure of dramatic conflict, about three main types of its construction.
Hero - Hero. Conflicts are built according to this type - Lyubov Yarovaya and her husband, Othello and Iago. In this case, the author and the viewer sympathize with one of the parties to the conflict, one of the heroes (or one group of heroes) and together with him they experience the circumstances of the struggle with the opposite side.
Author dramatic work and the viewer are always on the same side, since the author’s task is to agree with the viewer, to convince the viewer of what he wants to convince him of. Is it necessary to emphasize that the author does not always reveal to the viewer his likes and dislikes in relation to his heroes. Moreover, a frontal statement of one’s positions has little to do with artistic work especially with drama. There is no need to rush around with ideas on stage. It is necessary for the viewer to leave the theater with them - Mayakovsky rightly said.
Another type of conflict construction: Hero - Auditorium. Satirical works are usually based on such a conflict. The audience denies behavior and morality with laughter satirical heroes acting on stage. The positive hero in this performance, as its author N.V. Gogol said about “The Inspector General,” is in the audience.
The third type of construction of the main conflict is the Hero (or heroes) and the Environment with which they are opposed. In this case, the author and the viewer are, as it were, in a third position, observing both the hero and the environment, following the vicissitudes of this struggle, without necessarily joining one side or the other. A classic example of such a construction is “The Living Corpse” by L. N. Tolstoy. The hero of the drama, Fyodor Protasov, is in conflict with the environment, whose sanctimonious morality forces him to first “leave” it into revelry and drunkenness, then to depict a fictitious death, and then to actually commit suicide.
The viewer will by no means consider Fyodor Protasov a positive hero worthy of imitation. But he will sympathize with him and, accordingly, will condemn the environment opposing Protasov - the so-called “color of society” - which forced him to die.
Vivid examples of constructing a conflict of the Hero-Wednesday type are Shakespeare's Hamlet, A. S. Griboedov's "Woe from Wit", and A. N. Ostrovsky's "The Thunderstorm".
The division of dramatic conflicts according to the type of their construction is not absolute. In many works one can observe a combination of two types of conflict construction. So, for example, if in satirical play, along with negative characters there are also positive heroes, in addition to the main conflict Hero - Auditorium, we will observe another - the conflict Hero - Hero, a conflict between positive and negative heroes on stage.
In addition, the Hero-Environment conflict ultimately contains the Hero-Hero conflict. After all, the environment in a dramatic work is not faceless. It also consists of heroes, sometimes very bright, whose names have become household names. Let us remember Famusov and Molchalin in “Woe from Wit”, or Kabanikha in “The Thunderstorm”. IN general concept“Wednesday” we unite them on the principle of the commonality of their views, a common attitude towards the hero opposing them.
Action in a dramatic work is nothing more than a conflict in development. It develops from the initial conflict situation that arose in the beginning. It develops not just sequentially - one event after another - but through the birth of a subsequent event from the previous one, thanks to the previous one, according to the laws of the cause-and-effect series. The action of the play in every this moment should be fraught with the development of further action.
The theory of dramaturgy at one time considered it necessary to observe three unities in a dramatic work: the unity of time, the unity of place and the unity of action. Practice, however, has shown that dramaturgy easily dispenses with the unity of place and time, but unity of action is a truly necessary condition for the existence of a dramatic work as a work of art.
Maintaining unity of action is essentially maintaining a single picture of the development of the main conflict. It is thus a condition for the creation complete image conflict event that is depicted in this work. Unity of action - a picture of the development of a continuous and not replaced main conflict during the play - is a criterion artistic integrity works. Violation of the unity of action - the substitution of a conflict tied up in the beginning - undermines the possibility of creating a holistic artistic image conflict event inevitably seriously reduces the artistic level of a dramatic work.
Action in a dramatic work should be considered only what happens directly on stage or on screen. The so-called “pre-stage”, “non-stage”, “off-stage” actions - all this is information that can contribute to the understanding of the action, but in no case can replace it. Abusing the amount of such information to the detriment of action greatly reduces the emotional impact of the play (performance) on the viewer, and sometimes reduces it to nothing.
In the literature one can sometimes find an insufficiently clear explanation of the relationship between the concepts of “conflict” and “action”. E. G. Kholodov writes about it this way: “The specific subject of depiction in drama is, as is known, life in motion, or in other words, action.” This is not accurate. Life in motion is any flow of life. It can, of course, be called action. Although, in relation to real life, it would be more accurate to talk not about action, but about actions. Life is endlessly active.
The subject of depiction in drama is not life in general, but one or another specific social conflict, personified in the heroes of this play. Action, therefore, is not the ebullience of life in general, but a given conflict in its specific development.
Further, E. G. Kholodov clarifies his formulation to some extent, but the definition of action remains imprecise: “Drama reproduces action in the form of a dramatic struggle,” he writes, “that is, in the form of a conflict.” We cannot agree with this. Drama does not reproduce action in the form of conflict, but, on the contrary, conflict in the form of action. And this is by no means a game words, but the restoration of the true essence of the concepts under consideration. Conflict is the source of action. Action is the form of its movement, its existence in a work.
The source of drama is life itself. The playwright takes the conflict from the real contradictions in the development of society to depict in his work. He subjectivizes it in specific characters, he organizes it in space and time, gives, in other words, his own picture of the development of the conflict, and creates dramatic action. Drama is an imitation of life - as Aristotle spoke about - only in its very in a general sense of these words. In each given work of drama, the action is not copied from any specific situation, but created, organized, sculpted by the author. The movement, therefore, proceeds in this way: the contradiction of the development of society; a typical conflict that objectively exists on the basis of a given contradiction; its author's concretization is personification in the heroes of the work, in their clashes, in their contradiction and opposition to each other; development of the conflict (from the beginning to the denouement, to the ending), that is, building the action.
Elsewhere, E. G. Kholodov, relying on Hegel’s thought, comes to a correct understanding of the relationship between the concepts of “conflict” and “action”.
Hegel writes: “Action presupposes antecedent circumstances leading to collisions, to action and reaction.”
The plot of the action, according to Hegel, lies where in the work appear, “given” by the author, “only those (and not any at all - D.A.) circumstances that, picked up by the individual make-up of the soul (of the hero) of this work- D.A.) and its needs, give rise to precisely that specific collision, the development and resolution of which constitutes the special action of a given work of art.”
So, action is the initiation, “unfolding” and “resolution” of the conflict.
The hero in a dramatic work must fight, be a participant in a social conflict. This, of course, does not mean that the heroes of others literary works poetry or prose do not participate in social struggle. But there may be other heroes. In a work of drama there should not be heroes who stand outside the depicted social conflict.
The author depicting a social conflict is always on one side of it. His sympathies and, accordingly, the sympathies of the readers are given to some heroes, and antipathies to others. At the same time, the concepts of “positive” and “negative” heroes are relative concepts and not very accurate. In each specific case, we can talk about positive and negative characters from the point of view of the author of this work.
In our general understanding modern life a positive hero is one who fights for the establishment of social justice, for progress, for the ideals of socialism. A negative hero is, accordingly, one who contradicts him in ideology, in politics, in behavior, in attitude to work.
The hero of a dramatic work is always a son of his time, and from this point of view, the choice of a hero for a dramatic work is also of a historical nature, determined by historical and social circumstances. At the dawn of Soviet drama, finding a positive and negative character was easy for authors. Negative hero there was everyone who held on to yesterday - representatives of the tsarist apparatus, nobles, landowners, merchants, White Guard generals, officers, sometimes even soldiers, but in any case everyone who fought against the young Soviet government. Accordingly, it was easy to find a positive hero in the ranks of revolutionaries, figures, parties, heroes civil war etc. Today, in a period of comparative peace, the task of finding a hero is much more difficult, because social conflicts are not expressed as clearly as they were expressed during the years of the revolution and civil war, or later, during the Great Patriotic War.
“Reds!”, “Whites!”, “ours!”, “fascists!” -- V different years Children screamed in different ways, looking at the cinema screens. The reaction of adults was not so immediate, but fundamentally similar. The division of heroes into “ours” and “not ours” in works dedicated to the revolution, civil, Patriotic War it was not difficult, neither for the authors nor for the audience. Unfortunately, the artificial division imposed from above by Stalin and his propaganda apparatus Soviet people on “ours” and “not ours” also provided material for working only with black and white paint, images from these positions of “positive” and “negative” heroes.
An acute social struggle, as we see, is happening now, both in the sphere of ideology, and in the sphere of production, and in the moral sphere, in matters of law, and norms of behavior. The drama of life, of course, never disappears. The struggle between movement and inertia, between indifference and burning, between broad-mindedness and limitation, between nobility and baseness, search and complacency, between good and evil in in a broad sense These words always exist and provide an opportunity to search for heroes, both positive, with whom we sympathize, and negative.
It has already been said above that the relativity of the concept of a “positive” hero also lies in the fact that in drama, as in literature in general, in a number of cases the hero with whom we sympathize is not an example to follow, a model of behavior in life position. Difficult to classify as positive With these points of view to the heroes Katerina from “The Thunderstorm” and Larisa from “Dowry” by A. N. Ostrovsky. We sincerely sympathize with them as victims of a society living according to the laws of animal morality, but we naturally reject their way of struggling with their lack of rights and humiliation. The main thing is that in life there are no absolutely positive or absolutely negative people. If people shared this way in life, and a “positive” person had no reason and opportunity to turn out to be “negative” and vice versa, art would lose its meaning. It would lose one of its most important purposes - to contribute to the improvement of the human person.
Only a lack of understanding of the essence of the impact of a dramatic work on the audience can explain the existence of primitive assessments of the ideological sound of a particular play by calculating the balance between the number of “positive” and “negative” characters. Especially often such calculations are used to evaluate satirical plays.
No one, presumably, would demand that for a correct understanding of I. E. Repin’s painting “Ivan the Terrible Kills His Son,” the artist depicted “positive” courtiers standing around the Tsar and Tsarevich, shaking their heads condemningly. No one will doubt the revolutionary pathos of B.V. Ioganson’s painting “Interrogation of Communists” on the grounds that there are only two communists depicted in it, and several White Guard counterintelligence officers. For works of drama, however, such an approach is considered possible, despite the fact that its history does not provide fewer examples its inadmissibility than painting, than any other art. The film “Chapaev” helped raise millions of heroes, although Chapaev dies at the end of the film. The famous tragedy of Sun. Vishnevsky is optimistic not only in name, although his heroine - the commissar - dies.
The moral victory or political rightness of heroes can increase or decrease not depending on their numbers.
The hero of a dramatic work, in contrast to the hero of prose, whom the author usually describes in detail and comprehensively, characterizes himself, in the words of A. M. Gorky, “autonomously,” by his actions, without the help of the author’s description. This does not mean that remarks cannot be given brief characteristics heroes. But we must not forget that stage directions are written for the director and performer. The audience in the theater will not hear them.
For example, the American playwright Tennessee Williams gives a devastating characterization of its main character, Stanley Kowalski, in a stage direction at the beginning of the play A Streetcar Named Desire. However, Stanley appears to the viewer as quite respectable and even handsome. Only as a result of his actions does he reveal himself as an egoist, a knight of profit, a rapist, as an evil and cruel person. The author's remark is intended here only for the director and performer. The viewer shouldn't know her.
Modern playwrights sometimes “voice” their stage directions with the help of a presenter, who, on behalf of the author, gives the characters the necessary characteristics. As a rule, the presenter appears in historical-documentary plays. To understand what is happening there, explanations are often necessary, which are impossible to put into the mouths of the characters themselves due to the documentary nature of their text, on the one hand, and most importantly in order to preserve a lively dialogue, not burdened with elements of commentary.
Features of the conflict. Chekhov developed a special concept for depicting life and man - fundamentally everyday, “non-heroic”: “Let everything on stage be as complex and at the same time as simple as in life. People have lunch, they only have lunch, and at this time their happiness is formed and their lives are broken.” For traditional do Chekhov's drama What is characteristic, first of all, is an event that disrupts the traditional course of life: a clash of passions, polar forces, and in these clashes the characters’ characters were more fully revealed (for example, in “The Thunderstorm” by A. N. Ostrovsky). In Chekhov's plays there are no acute conflicts, clashes, or struggles. It seems like nothing is happening in them. The episodes are filled with ordinary, even unrelated conversations, trifles of everyday life, and insignificant details. As stated in the play “Uncle Vanya”, the world will perish not from “loud” events, “not from robbers, not from fires, but from hatred, enmity, from all these petty squabbles...”. Chekhov's works do not move from event to event (we do not have the opportunity to follow the development of the plot - due to the lack of one), but rather from mood to mood. Plays are built not on opposition, but on unity, the commonality of all characters - unity in the face of the general disorder of life. A.P. Skaftymov wrote about the peculiarities of the conflict in Chekhov’s plays: “There are no guilty ones, therefore, there are no direct opponents. There are no direct opponents, there is no and cannot be a struggle. The culprit is a combination of circumstances that seem to be outside the sphere of influence of these people. The sad situation develops beyond their will, and suffering comes by itself.”
Conflict in a dramatic work drives the plot, gives rise to various conflicts, and helps reveal the characters’ characters. Conflict is a clash of different interests, different moral attitudes, different characters and temperaments. However, it can also be internal; conflict can be found even in lyrical works, where opposing images and concepts are connected, and at assembly junctions-contradictions.
Weakening the plot intrigue and muting the conflict due to the careful depiction of scenes, situations and characters extraneous to the main plot, which acquire a completely independent meaning. The everyday flow of life in its small and random manifestations becomes distinctive feature and the main object of depiction in Chekhov’s drama. The “eventlessness” of Chekhov’s plays is directly related to their “many characters” (the absence central character, the bearer of a certain idea or important value setting).
The originality of the new type of drama created by Chekhov clearly emerged. Everyday life becomes the main and only source of dramatic conflict in Chekhov, the struggle traditional for pre-Chekhov drama. characters, “collision of characters” (V. G. Belinsky’s formula), plot twists and turns as the main form of action development are lost in Chekhov's plays its former organizing role. The point here is not this or that event, not the contradictions of human interests and passions. In the world of Chekhov's drama, everyone, or almost everyone, suffers, and no one in particular is to blame. “...It is not individual people who are to blame, but the entire existing structure of life as a whole.”
Dialogues in Chekhov's plays acquired a “monological form.”
To create the impression of greater everyday verisimilitude, Chekhov also uses sound and noise effects: the sound of an alarm bell, the sound of a bell, playing the violin, the sound of an ax on trees. Accompanying or interspersing conversations and remarks of the characters, he achieves the fusion of verbal, “significant” and non-verbal, “insignificant” sound series into one common sound whole, in which the traditional rigid boundary between “significant” and “insignificant” begins to shift and blur. .
Strengthening the role of psychological “subtext”, the sphere of the hero’s hidden emotional experiences that are not reflected in his conscious speech, but are expressed in random remarks or slips of the tongue.
conflict mass climax
Dramatic conflict is one of the main types of artistic conflict. Unlike the clashes between people depicted in epic literature, K. d. has pronounced features. The drama shows people in actions, in which an acute struggle of opposing forces is manifested with the most concentrated expression of the characters and the entire spiritual make-up of the heroes. An indispensable property of character in drama is its conflict potential - the potential ability to put forward and defend one’s life position and aspirations in the struggle. This ability arises not from psychological sources (firmness, determination, conviction, etc. - all of which the hero of the drama may not possess), but precisely from the aesthetic laws of the drama, where character and conflict appear in unity. Two main sources of K. d.: the first is the struggle of interests, the second is the struggle of ideas, moral norms, attitudes towards life (V. A. Sakhnovsky-Pankeev, 1973)
CONFLICT (from Latin conflictus - collision), a clash of parties, opinions, forces. ARTISTIC CONFLICT (dramatic) (artistic collision), confrontation, contradiction between the active forces depicted in the work: characters, character and circumstances, various aspects of character. It is directly revealed in the plot, as well as in the composition. Usually forms the core of the topic and problem, and the nature of its resolution is one of the determining factors artistic idea. Being the basis (and “energy”) of the developing action, the artistic conflict in its course is transformed in the direction of climax and denouement and, as a rule, finds its plot resolution in them. For example, based DRAMATIC play Ostrovsky's thunderstorm lies in the conflict between the individual and the surrounding society (Katerina and " dark kingdom"). The action of “The Thunderstorm” takes place on the banks of the Volga in an ancient city, where, as it seems, nothing has changed for centuries and cannot change, and it is in the conservative patriarchal family of this city that Ostrovsky sees manifestations of an irresistible renewal of life, its selfless and rebellious beginning. A conflict “breaks out” between two opposing characters, human nature. Two opposing forces are embodied in the young merchant's wife Katerina Kabanova and her mother-in-law, Marfa Kabanova. Kabanikha is a convinced and principled keeper of antiquity, once and for all found and established norms and rules of life. Katerina is an ever-searching, creative person who takes bold risks for the sake of the living needs of her soul. From the dialogic nature of dramaturgy, another basic concept of the structure of a play arises - conflict. We are not talking about a specific reason for the clash of characters - in any case, not only about it. The concept of conflict for dramaturgy is comprehensive; it covers not only plot conflicts, but also all other aspects of the play - social, ideological, philosophical. So, for example, in Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard the conflict lies not only in the difference in the positions of Ranevskaya and Lopakhin, but in the ideological conflict of the emerging bourgeois class with the departing, full of inescapable charm, but helpless and unviable lordly intelligentsia. In Ostrovsky's Thunderstorm, specific plot conflicts between Katerina and Kabanikha, Katerina and Boris, Katerina and Varvara develop into a social conflict between the Domostroevsky way of life merchant Russia and the heroine’s desire to freely express her personality. Moreover, often the main conflict of a dramatic work can, so to speak, be taken beyond the plot. This is especially characteristic of satirical drama: for example, in Gogol’s The Inspector General, among whose characters there are no positive characters at all, the main conflict lies in the contradiction between the depicted reality and the ideal. Throughout the entire historical development of drama, the content of conflicts, the characters of the characters and even the principles of composition had their own characteristics - depending on the current aesthetic direction theatrical arts, the genre of a particular play (tragedy, comedy, drama itself, etc.), the dominant ideology, the topicality of the issue, etc. However, these three aspects are the main features of dramaturgy as a type of literature.
The term " drama"(from Greek " action», « action") is used in several meanings. This concept is used not only to designate one of the three types of literature (epic, lyric, drama), but also in a broader and deeper sense. We call dramatic works plots, circumstances, destinies that exist in art of various kinds and even types.
Linguistics determines the meaning of words " drama" And " drama“very generally and mainly from the subjective side, as “a difficult event, an experience that causes moral suffering”, “any stunning event in life”, “a certain range of phenomena of reality (“life drama”), and one of the genres dramatic kind literature (“bourgeois drama” of the 18th century), the leading type of performing arts is drama theatre.”
And finally, the modern edition of the encyclopedia “Theater” gives us the following definition dramas: “a type of literary work written in the form of dialogue and intended to be performed by actors on stage. Drama refers to two arts at the same time: theater and literature. Dramatic conflicts, reflecting specific historical and personal contradictions, are embodied in the behavior and actions of the characters, primarily in dialogues and monologues!
The text of the drama, focused on spectacular expressiveness, is accompanied by facial expressions, gestures, and certain movements. It is consistent with the possibilities of stage time and with the construction of mise-en-scène. Literary drama, realized by the actor and director, has a scenic quality. Leading genres of drama: tragedy, comedy, tragicomedy.
Dramaturgy – a set of dramatic works of a particular writer, people, era. The concept is used to denote the theory of dramatic construction. In a stage performance, dramaturgy is the plot and compositional basis of a separate theatrical work, for example, the dramaturgy of a play.”
As a kind of verbal art intended for the theater, drama has been considered since the time of Plato and Aristotle, who notes in Poetics that “a writer can take three paths in description - at the same time becoming something of an outsider, as Homer does, or from his own person, without replacing himself with others, or depicting everyone acting and showing their energy.”
Aristotle considers drama on a par with other poetic genres. Expressing an extremely important, fundamental point about action as the main element of drama.
« Action– development of events that forms the basis of the plot(plot)". The concept of action can be deciphered in the comparative-figurative example of V.I. Nemirovich-Danchenko: “You can build a wonderful building, install an excellent administration, invite musicians, and still there will be no theater; but three actors will come out onto the square, lay out a rug and start playing a play, even without makeup and furnishings, and the theater already exists.” Whatever the nature of the stage design - emphatically conventional or “illusory”, generalized symbolic or everyday, in all cases the character of a person and the logic of his actions and deeds remain unconditional in dramaturgy. This is where its decisive aesthetic criterion lies. Dramaturgy is an art centered on active person, its action is the primary element, the basis artistic expression dramaturgy.
Where does the action begin? Relying on long historical experience art, Hegel points out that there is a difference between the beginning of action in real world and how the action begins in a work of art. Following the law established already in ancient poetry, Hegel rightly asserts that the action should begin not with individual first premises, which are sometimes prosaic, completely uninteresting, devoid of drama, but with some essential moment. He contrasts the "empirical beginning" and the poetic beginning, showing that "art does not seek to begin with an event that is the external beginning of a certain action."
Picture of action in to the greatest extent accessible to poetry, one of the types of which is drama. “Action,” Hegel writes, “is the clearest revelation of man, the revelation of both his state of mind and his goals. What man is at his deepest core is realized only through action...”
Based on the fact that artistic image must be imbued with internal unity, Hegel emphasizes that if in life we are faced with the diversity of human actions, then “for art the range of actions suitable in nature for the image as a whole is always limited.” This limitation is determined by the fact that the work must embody only that range of actions, “the need for which is determined by the idea.”
Dramatic action and the logic of its development receive an aesthetically adequate reflection in dramatic art, just as thought finds it in literature, in fine arts– the external appearance of an object, its structure, color, in music – intonation. It reproduces the action directly in its entirety and cannot be reproduced with the same aesthetic result by either a play or any other form of art.
But if drama cannot be considered a universal way of embodying drama, all the diversity of its real manifestations, then at the same time it undoubtedly occupies a special place in this area. This significance of drama is explained by the fact that it reflects the most essential aspect of the dramatic content of life.
V. Wolkenstein views the action of drama solely as a struggle of “equal” human aspirations. He talks about the need in drama for “continuous dramatic struggle” generated by the “contradiction of interests” of characters.
Thus, an action must always be performed according to the laws human life, is an indivisible element of human action, determined by purpose. Action is a means, a “provocateur of inspiration,” a “lever” that leads from the world of reality to the fictional world.
"Exist three main ways of development, actions aimed at covering events from their origins to completion. First way, the most common, is to depict events in chronological sequence(dramas by Shakespeare, Moliere, Schiller, Chekhov, Gorky, etc.). Second, inherent in analytical-retrospective drama, consists in depicting the action only at the moment of its approach to the denouement of the event. In such cases, previous events are restored during the action itself through the stories of the characters (“Oedipus the King” by Sophocles, “Providence”). Third the method consists of interrupting the main action with a stage depiction of previous events (“Mother” by Capek, “ Dangerous bend"and "Time and the Conway Family" by Priestley, "Irkutsk History" by Arbuzov)."
So, drama is necessarily an active continuous action that is realized in the plot. Plot(French) means "chain of events". Any dramatic work is based on intrigue, built on events in development that can easily be retold. Ostrovsky called it a plot. " There is a plot short story about some incident, incident, a story devoid of any color.”
Fable- this is the skeleton of the plot, the core on which the development of events is strung. Thus, the plot seems to convey only the main frame of events, but not their essence; Only the plot can do that. "Under plot often, of course, the content is completely ready-made, that is, a script with all the details.”
The events that make up the plot can be related to each other in different ways. In some cases, they are only in a temporary connection with each other (B happened after A). In other cases, there are cause-and-effect relationships between events in addition to temporary ones (B occurred as a result of A).
Accordingly, there are two types of plots. Plots dominated by purely temporary connections between events are chronicles. Plots with a predominance of cause-and-effect relationships are called plots of a single action, or concentric. Aristotle spoke about these two types of plots (plots), who noted that there are, firstly, “episodic plots”, which consist of unrelated, disconnected events and actions that occurred over a certain period of time, and, secondly, secondly, plots based on a single and integral action. Each of these two types of organization of a work has its own artistic possibilities, its own merits and advantages in comparison with the other.
So, event follows event, building storyline and as Hegel figuratively said, the dramatic process “is constant movement forward to the ultimate catastrophe." And the main specificity of dramatic action is determined, first of all, by conflict (collision).
« Conflict(art) represents a struggle or contradiction active forces described in the work(for example, a conflict between two characters, character and circumstances, or between two parties of the same character). As a rule, the conflict manifests itself in the plot itself, revealing its essence. The resolution of the conflict is one of the determining factors of the idea. Artistic conflict lies at the heart of the developing action and gradually develops into a climax and denouement.”
Based on the semantics of the word conflict ( from Latin conflictus - collision) we can consider that this is, first of all, a clash of characters, destinies, opinions, that is, some kind of effective act, which in individual plan or on a historical scale leads to a change in the initial situation, existing relationships, it acquires significance not in itself, but, first of all, as a moment of development, a link in a single process.
“There are two types of conflicts embodied in works of art. The first are incidental conflicts: local and transient contradictions, confined within a single set of circumstances and fundamentally solvable by the will of individual people. The second are “substantial” conflicts, that is, stable and long-term contradictory situations, certain states of life that arise and disappear not thanks to individual actions and accomplishments, but according to the “will” of history and nature.
The true meaning and internal logic of the conflict are revealed only in the light of the initial motives that cause it, the prerequisites and the consequences to which it leads.
This has its own contradictions and difficulties. Reflecting on the conflict, Hegel reasonably notes that for every dramatic action there are many diverse, distant and near, causes, and the playwright’s art is manifested in the choice of the appropriate “starting point.”
This point is not absolute. In a truly profound and artistic dramatic work, the conflict is always “directly” determined, justified and at the same time unfolds on the dune of broader premises and perspectives, present in an indirect, indirect form. In terms of content, the measure of its depth is determined by its connection with the decisive socio-historical patterns of time, its true “driving forces!” From an artistic point of view, the problem lies in internal harmony, the proportionality of the “direct” and “mediated” depiction of the various phases of dramatic action, the unity of its “scale”.
These phases in the language of drama theory, its technologies are usually called exposition, plot, climax and denouement, that is, the composition of a dramatic work.