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Dram. works

Dramatic works are organized by the characters' statements. According to Gorky, “the play requires that each acting unit be characterized in word and deed independently, without prompting from the author” (50, 596). There is no detailed narrative-descriptive image here. The actual author's speech, with the help of which what is depicted is characterized from the outside, is auxiliary and episodic in drama. These are the name of the play, its genre subtitle, an indication of the place and time of action, a list of characters, sometimes

accompanied by their brief summative characteristics, preceding acts and episodes, descriptions of the stage situation, as well as stage directions given in the form of a commentary on individual remarks of the characters. All this constitutes the secondary text of a dramatic work. Basically, his text is a chain of dialogical remarks and monologues of the characters.

Hence the certain limitations of the artistic possibilities of drama. A writer-playwright uses only part of the visual means that are available to the creator of a novel or epic, short story or story. And the characters of the characters are revealed in drama with less freedom and completeness than in epic. “I...perceive drama,” noted T. Mann, “as the art of silhouette and I feel only the person being told as three-dimensional, whole, real and plastic image» (69, 386). At the same time, playwrights, unlike authors of epic works, are forced to limit themselves to the volume of verbal text that meets the needs of theatrical art. Plot time in a drama must fit within the strict framework of stage time. And the performance in forms familiar to European theater lasts, as is known, no more than three to four hours. And this requires an appropriate size of the dramatic text.

At the same time, the author of the play also has significant advantages over the creators of stories and novels. One moment depicted in the drama is closely adjacent to another, neighboring one. The time of the events reproduced by the playwright during the stage episode (see Chapter X) is not compressed or stretched; the characters in the drama exchange remarks without any noticeable time intervals, and their statements, as Stanislavsky noted, form a solid, uninterrupted line. If with the help of narration the action is captured as something in the past, then the chain of dialogues and monologues in the drama creates the illusion of the present time. Life here speaks as if from its own own person: between what is depicted and the reader there is no intermediary - the narrator. The action of the drama takes place as if before the eyes of the reader. “All narrative forms,” wrote F. Schiller, “transfer the present into the past; everything dramatic makes the past present.” (106, 58).

The dramatic genre of literature recreates the action with

maximum spontaneity. Drama does not allow summary characteristics of events and actions that would replace their detail. And it is, as Yu. Olesha noted, “a test of rigor and at the same time the flight of talent, a sense of form and everything special and amazing that makes up talent.” (71, 252). Bunin expressed a similar thought about drama: “We have to compress thoughts into precise forms. But it’s so exciting.”

FORMS OF BEHAVIOR OF CHARACTERS

Characters in drama reveal themselves in behavior (primarily in spoken words) more clearly than characters in epic works. And this is natural. Firstly, the dramatic form encourages the characters to “talk a lot.” Secondly, the words of the characters in the drama are oriented towards the wide space of the stage and auditorium, so that the speech is perceived as addressed directly to the audience and potentially loud. “The theater requires... exaggerated broad lines both in voice, recitation and gestures” (98, 679), wrote N. Boileau. And D. Diderot noted that “you cannot be a playwright without having eloquence” (52, 604).

The behavior of the characters in the drama is marked by activity, flashiness, and effectiveness. It is, in other words, theatrical. Theatricality is speech and gestures carried out with the expectation of a public, mass effect. It is the antipode of the intimacy and inexpressiveness of the forms of action. Behavior filled with theatricality becomes the most important subject of depiction in drama. Dramatic action often accomplished with the active participation of a wide range of people. Such are many scenes of Shakespeare’s plays (especially the final ones), the climax of Gogol’s “The Government Inspector” and Ostrovsky’s “The Thunderstorm,” and the pivotal episodes of Vishnevsky’s “Optimistic Tragedy.” The viewer is especially strongly influenced by episodes where there is an audience on stage: depictions of meetings, rallies, mass performances, etc. Stage episodes that show a few people, if their behavior is open, not inhibited, and impressive, also leave a vivid impression. “Like he acted out in the theater,” comments Bubnov (“At the Lower Depths” by Gorky) on the frenzied tirade of the desperate Kleshch about the truth, which, with an unexpected and sharp intrusion into the general conversation, gave it its own theatrical character.

At the same time, playwrights (especially supporters

realistic art) feel the need to go beyond theatricality: to recreate human behavior in all its richness and diversity, capturing both private, domestic, intimate life, where people express themselves in word and gesture sparingly and unpretentiously. At the same time, the speech of the characters, which according to the logic of what is being depicted should not be spectacular and bright, is presented in dramas and performances as lengthy, full-voiced, and hyperbolically expressive. This reflects a certain limitation of the possibilities of drama: playwrights (like actors on stage) are forced to elevate the “non-theatrical in life” to the rank of “theatrical in art.”

In a broad sense, any work of art is conditional, that is, not identical real life. At the same time, the term convention (in the narrow sense) denotes ways of reproducing life, in which the inconsistency and even the contrast between the forms depicted and the forms of reality itself are emphasized. In this regard artistic conventions are opposed to “plausibility” or “life-likeness”. “Everything should be essentially vital, not necessarily everything should be life-like,” wrote Fadeev. “Among many forms there may also be a conditional form.” (96, 662) (i.e. “non-life-like.” - V. X.).

In dramatic works, where the behavior of the characters is theatricalized, conventions are especially widely used. The inevitable departure of drama from life-likeness has been spoken about more than once. Thus, Pushkin argued that “of all types of works, the most improbable works are dramatic ones.” (79, 266), and Zola called drama and theater “the citadel of everything conventional” (61, 350).

Characters in dramas often speak out not because they need it in the course of the action, but because the author needs to explain something to readers and viewers, to make a certain impression on them. Thus, additional characters are sometimes introduced into dramatic works, who either themselves narrate what is not shown on stage (messengers in ancient plays), or, becoming interlocutors of the main characters, encourage them to talk about what happened (choirs and their luminaries in ancient tragedies ; confidantes and servants in comedies of antiquity, Renaissance, classicism). In so-called epic dramas, actor-characters from time to time address the audience, “step out of character” and, as if from the outside, report on what is happening.

A tribute to convention is, further, the saturation of speech in drama with maxims, aphorisms, and reasoning about what is happening. The monologues pronounced by the heroes alone are also conventional. Such monologues are not actual speech acts, but a purely stage technique of bringing internal speech out into the open; There are many of them both in ancient tragedies and in the drama of modern times. Even more conventional are the “to the side” lines, which seem to not exist for the other characters on stage, but are clearly audible to the audience.

It would be wrong, of course, to “assign” theatrical hyperbole to the dramatic genre of literature alone. Similar phenomena are characteristic of classical epics and adventure novels, but if we talk about the classics of the 19th century. - for the works of Dostoevsky. However, it is in drama that the convention of verbal self-disclosure of characters becomes the leading artistic trend. The author of the drama, setting up a kind of experiment, shows how a person would speak if in the spoken words he expressed his moods with maximum completeness and brightness. Naturally, dramatic dialogues and monologues turn out to be much more extensive and effective than those remarks that could be uttered in a similar situation in life. As a result, speech in drama often takes on similarities with artistic, lyrical or oratorical speech: the heroes of dramatic works tend to speak like improvisers - poets or sophisticated speakers. Therefore, Hegel was partly right when he viewed drama as a synthesis of the epic principle (eventfulness) and the lyrical principle (speech expression).

From antiquity to the era of romanticism - from Aeschylus and Sophocles to Schiller and Hugo - dramatic works in the overwhelming majority of cases gravitated toward dramatic and demonstrative theatricalization. L. Tolstoy reproached Shakespeare for the abundance of hyperbole, which allegedly “violates the possibility of artistic impression.” From the very first words,” he wrote about the tragedy “King Lear,” “one can see the exaggeration: exaggeration of events, exaggeration of feelings and exaggeration of expressions.” (89, 252). In his assessment of Shakespeare's work, L. Tolstoy was wrong, but the idea of the adherence of the great English playwright completely fair to theatrical hyperbole. What has been said about “King Lear” can with no less justification be attributed to ancient comedies and tragedies.

days, dramatic works of classicism, Schiller's tragedies, etc.

In the 19th-20th centuries, when the desire for everyday authenticity of artistic paintings prevailed in literature, the conventions inherent in drama began to be reduced to a minimum. The origins of this phenomenon are the so-called “philistine drama” of the 18th century, the creators and theorists of which were Diderot and Lessing. Works of the greatest Russian playwrights of the 19th century. and the beginning of the 20th century - A. Ostrovsky, Chekhov and Gorky - are distinguished by the authenticity of the life forms recreated. But even when playwrights focused on the verisimilitude of what was being depicted, plot, psychological and actual speech hyperboles were preserved. Even in Chekhov’s dramaturgy, which showed the maximum limit of “life-likeness,” theatrical conventions made themselves felt. Let's take a closer look at the final scene of Three Sisters. One young woman, ten or fifteen minutes ago, broke up with her loved one, probably forever. Another five minutes ago found out about the death of her fiancé. And so they, together with the elder, third sister, sum up the moral and philosophical results of what happened, reflecting to the sounds of a military march about the fate of their generation, about the future of humanity. It is hardly possible to imagine this happening in reality. But we don’t notice the implausibility of the ending of “Three Sisters”, since we are accustomed to the fact that drama significantly changes the forms of people’s life.

Drama occupies a special position in the literary system, since it is at the same time a full-fledged literary genre, and a phenomenon that naturally belongs to the theater. Drama as a genus has a specific content, the essence of which was the awareness of the contradictions of reality, and “first of all, its social contradictions through the relationships of people and their individual destinies.” Unlike the epic, in drama we see “imitation of action ... through action, and not story." According to the precise and figurative definition of V.G. Belinsky, “the drama represents the accomplished event as if it were taking place in the present time, before the eyes of the reader or viewer.”

The specific features of drama as a genre are the absence of a narrator and a sharp weakening of the descriptive element. The basis of drama is visible action, and this affects the special relationship between the movement of events and the speeches of the characters. The statements of the characters and the arrangement and relationship of parts are the most important ways of revealing the author’s thoughts. In relation to them, other ways of expressing author's position(list of characters, stage directions, instructions for directors and actors) play a subordinate role.

The most important content category in drama is conflict. Of course, conflicts also exist in the epic, they can also be present in a lyrical work, but their role and meaning in the epic and lyrical plot are different than in drama. The choice of conflicts and their arrangement into a system largely determine the uniqueness of the writer’s position; dramatic clashes are an essential way of identifying the life programs of characters and self-disclosure of their characters. The conflict largely determines the direction and rhythm of the plot movement in the play.

The content of conflicts, as well as the methods of their implementation in a dramatic work, can be of a different nature. Traditionally, drama conflicts are divided into tragic, comic and dramatic according to their content, emotional severity and coloring. The first two types are distinguished in accordance with the two main genre forms of drama; they originally accompany tragedy and comedy, reflecting the most significant aspects of life conflicts. The third one arose at a rather late stage of drama, and its understanding is associated with the theory of drama developed by Lessing ("Hamburg Drama") and Diderot ("The Paradox of the Actor").

Of course, conflict, with all its meaningful ambiguity and diversity of functions, is not the only component that determines the specificity of drama as a genre. No less important are the methods of plot organization and dramatic narration, the relationship speech characteristics heroes and construction of action, etc. However, we deliberately focus on the category of conflict. On the one hand, analysis of this aspect allows, based on the generic specifics of the drama, to reveal the depth of the artistic content of the work and take into account the peculiarities of the author’s attitude towards the world. On the other hand, it is the consideration of conflict that can become the leading direction in the school analysis of a dramatic work, since high school students are characterized by an interest in effective clashes of beliefs and characters, through which the problems of the struggle between good and evil are revealed. Through the study of the conflict, it is possible to lead schoolchildren to comprehend the motives behind the words and actions of the heroes, to reveal the originality of the author's intention and the moral position of the writer. To identify the role of this category in creating the eventual and ideological tension of the drama, in expressing the social and ethical programs of the characters, in recreating their psychology is the task of this section.

Drama depicts a person only in action, in the process of which he discovers all sides of his personality. “Dramaticism,” emphasized V.G. Belinsky, noting the features of drama, “consists not in one conversation, but in the living action of those talking to each other.”

In works of the dramatic genre, unlike epic and lyrical genres, there are no author's descriptions, narration, or digressions. The author's speech appears only in stage directions. The reader or viewer learns everything that happens to the heroes of the drama from the heroes themselves. The playwright, therefore, does not talk about the lives of his characters, but shows them in action?

Due to the fact that the heroes of dramatic works manifest themselves only in action, their speech has a number of features: it is directly related to their actions, more dynamic and expressive than the speech of the heroes of epic works. Great importance in dramatic works they also have intonation, pause, tone, i.e. all those features of speech that become concrete on stage.

The playwright, as a rule, depicts only those events that are necessary to reveal the characters' personalities and, therefore, to justify the developing struggle between the characters. All other life facts that are not directly related to what is depicted and that slow down the development of the action are excluded.

Everything shown in a play, tragedy, comedy or drama is tied by the playwright, in Gogol’s apt expression, “into one big common knot.” Hence the concentration of events depicted and minor characters around the main characters. The plot of the drama is characterized by tension and rapid development. This feature of the plot of dramatic works distinguishes it from the plot of epic works, although both plots are built on common elements: plot, climax and denouement.

The difference between drama and epic and lyric poetry is also expressed in the fact that works of the dramatic genre are written for the theater and receive their final completion only on the stage. In turn, the theater influences them, subordinating them to some extent to its laws. Dramatic works are divided, for example, into actions, phenomena or scenes, the change of which involves a change of scenery and costumes. In approximately three or four acts of the play, that is, during the three or four hours occupied by the performance, the playwright must show the emergence of the conflict, its development and completion. These requirements for playwrights oblige them to choose such phenomena and life events in which the characters of the people depicted are especially clearly manifested.

While working on a play, the playwright sees not only his hero, but also his performer. This is evidenced by numerous statements of writers. Regarding the performance of the roles of Bobchinsky and Dobchinsky N.V. Gogol wrote: “... creating these two little officials, I imagined Shchepkin and Ryazantsov in their skin...” We find the same thoughts in A.P. Chekhov. During work Art Theater over the performance" The Cherry Orchard“Chekhov reported to K.S. Stanislavsky: “When I wrote Lopakhin, I thought that this was your role.”

There is another dependence of a dramatic work on the theater. It manifests itself in the fact that the reader connects the play with the stage in his imagination. When reading plays, images of certain supposed or actual performers of the roles arise. If the theater, in the words of A.V. Lunacharsky is a form, the content of which is determined by dramaturgy, then the actors, in turn, help the playwright complete the images with their performance. The scene to some extent replaces the author's descriptions. “Drama lives only on stage,” wrote N.V. Gogol to M.P. Pogodin. “Without it, it is like a soul without a body.”

Theater creates a much greater illusion of life than any other art. Everything that happens on stage is perceived by the audience especially acutely and directly. This is the enormous educational power of dramaturgy, which distinguishes it from other types of poetry.

The originality of drama, its difference from epic and lyric poetry, gives reason to raise the question of some features in the relationship of methods and techniques used in the analysis of dramatic works in secondary school.

Hence the certain limitations of the artistic possibilities of drama. A writer-playwright uses only part of the visual means that are available to the creator of a novel or epic, short story or story. And the characters of the characters are revealed in drama with less freedom and completeness than in epic. “I...perceive drama,” noted T. Mann, “as the art of silhouette and I feel only the person being told as a three-dimensional, integral, real and plastic image.” (69, 386). At the same time, playwrights, unlike authors of epic works, are forced to limit themselves to the volume of verbal text that meets the needs of theatrical art. Plot time in a drama must fit within the strict framework of stage time. And the performance in forms familiar to European theater lasts, as is known, no more than three to four hours. And this requires an appropriate size of the dramatic text.

At the same time, the author of the play also has significant advantages over the creators of stories and novels. One moment depicted in the drama is closely adjacent to another, neighboring one. The time of the events reproduced by the playwright during the stage episode (see Chapter X) is not compressed or stretched; the characters in the drama exchange remarks without any noticeable time intervals, and their statements, as Stanislavsky noted, form a solid, uninterrupted line. If with the help of narration the action is captured as something in the past, then the chain of dialogues and monologues in the drama creates the illusion of the present time. Life here speaks as if on its own behalf: between what is depicted and the reader there is no intermediary - the narrator. The action of the drama takes place as if before the eyes of the reader. “All narrative forms,” wrote F. Schiller, “transfer the present into the past; everything dramatic makes the past present.” (106, 58).

The dramatic genre of literature recreates the action with

FORMS OF BEHAVIOR OF CHARACTERS

The behavior of the characters in the drama is marked by activity, flashiness, and effectiveness. It is, in other words, theatrical. Theatricality is speech and gestures carried out with the expectation of a public, mass effect. It is the antipode of the intimacy and inexpressiveness of the forms of action. Behavior filled with theatricality becomes the most important subject of depiction in drama. Dramatic action often involves the active participation of a wide range of people. Such are many scenes of Shakespeare’s plays (especially the final ones), the climax of Gogol’s “The Government Inspector” and Ostrovsky’s “The Thunderstorm,” and the pivotal episodes of Vishnevsky’s “Optimistic Tragedy.” The viewer is especially strongly influenced by episodes where there is an audience on stage: depictions of meetings, rallies, mass performances, etc. Stage episodes that show a few people, if their behavior is open, not inhibited, and impressive, also leave a vivid impression. “Like he acted out in the theater,” comments Bubnov (“At the Lower Depths” by Gorky) on the frenzied tirade of the desperate Kleshch about the truth, which, with an unexpected and sharp intrusion into the general conversation, gave it its own theatrical character.

At the same time, playwrights (especially supporters

realistic art) feel the need to go beyond theatricality: to recreate human behavior in all its richness and diversity, capturing private, home, intimate life, where people express themselves in word and gesture sparingly and unpretentiously. At the same time, the speech of the characters, which according to the logic of what is being depicted should not be spectacular and bright, is presented in dramas and performances as lengthy, full-voiced, and hyperbolically expressive. This reflects a certain limitation of the possibilities of drama: playwrights (like actors on stage) are forced to elevate the “non-theatrical in life” to the rank of “theatrical in art.”

In a broad sense, any work of art is conditional, that is, it is not identical to real life. At the same time, the term convention (in the narrow sense) denotes ways of reproducing life, in which the inconsistency and even the contrast between the forms depicted and the forms of reality itself are emphasized. In this respect, artistic conventions are opposed to “plausibility” or “life-likeness.” “Everything should be essentially vital, not necessarily everything should be life-like,” wrote Fadeev. “Among many forms there may also be a conditional form.” (96, 662) (i.e. “non-life-like.” - V. X.).

From antiquity to the era of romanticism - from Aeschylus and Sophocles to Schiller and Hugo - dramatic works in the overwhelming majority of cases gravitated toward dramatic and demonstrative theatricalization. L. Tolstoy reproached Shakespeare for the abundance of hyperbole, which allegedly “violates the possibility of artistic impression.” From the very first words,” he wrote about the tragedy “King Lear,” “one can see the exaggeration: exaggeration of events, exaggeration of feelings and exaggeration of expressions.” (89, 252). In his assessment of Shakespeare's work, L. Tolstoy was wrong, but the idea that the great English playwright was committed to theatrical hyperbole is completely fair. What has been said about “King Lear” can with no less justification be attributed to ancient comedies and tragedies.

days, dramatic works of classicism, Schiller's tragedies, etc.

Hence the certain limitations of the artistic possibilities of drama. A writer-playwright uses only part of the visual means that are available to the creator of a novel or epic, short story or story. And the characters of the characters are revealed in drama with less freedom and completeness than in epic. “I...perceive drama,” noted T. Mann, “as the art of silhouette and I feel only the person being told as a three-dimensional, integral, real and plastic image.” (69, 386). At the same time, playwrights, unlike authors of epic works, are forced to limit themselves to the volume of verbal text that meets the needs of theatrical art. Plot time in a drama must fit within the strict framework of stage time. And the performance in forms familiar to European theater lasts, as is known, no more than three to four hours. And this requires an appropriate size of the dramatic text.

At the same time, the author of the play also has significant advantages over the creators of stories and novels. One moment depicted in the drama is closely adjacent to another, neighboring one. The time of the events reproduced by the playwright during the stage episode (see Chapter X) is not compressed or stretched; the characters in the drama exchange remarks without any noticeable time intervals, and their statements, as Stanislavsky noted, form a solid, uninterrupted line. If with the help of narration the action is captured as something in the past, then the chain of dialogues and monologues in the drama creates the illusion of the present time. Life here speaks as if on its own behalf: between what is depicted and the reader there is no intermediary - the narrator. The action of the drama takes place as if before the eyes of the reader. “All narrative forms,” wrote F. Schiller, “transfer the present into the past; everything dramatic makes the past present.” (106, 58).

The dramatic genre of literature recreates the action with

Introduction

Familiarity with the specifics of drama as a special kind of literature and teaching methods will help to understand the originality and originality of each of the studied dramatic works and will contribute to a more meaningful perception of it.

“A play, a drama, a comedy is the most difficult form of literature,” wrote M. Gorky. “... In a novel, in a story, the people portrayed by the author act with his help, he is with them all the time , he shows the reader how to understand them, explains to him the secret thoughts, hidden motives of the actions of the depicted figures, shades their moods with descriptions of nature, situation... controls their actions, deeds, words, relationships... The play is troubling. wants each unit operating in it to be characterized both in word and deed independently, without prompting from the author...”

The playwright does not talk about the life or characters of his characters, but shows them in action. The lack of author's characteristics, portrait and other components of the image characteristic of prose complicates the perception of drama by students. Therefore, it is necessary to look for techniques and forms of work that, on the one hand, would make it possible to introduce schoolchildren to the specifics of drama as a special kind of literature, and on the other hand, would help them to see in the samples being studied works intended for the stage and therefore requiring much more imagination and effort on the part of the reader. This is the relevance of the work, that the uniqueness of drama, its difference from epic and lyric poetry give grounds to raise the question of some features in the correlation of methods and techniques used in the analysis of dramatic works in secondary school.

Purpose of the work: to identify the specifics of teaching a dramatic work based on the material of A.N. Ostrovsky’s play “Dowry”.

To achieve this goal, it is necessary to solve the following tasks:

Identify the specifics of drama as a type of literature;

Get acquainted with the methodology of teaching drama at school;

Find out the features of studying A.N. Ostrovsky’s play “Dowry”

The work consists of an introduction, two chapters, a conclusion, and literature.

Study of Dramatic Works

Specifics of the drama

Drama occupies a special position in the literary system, since it is both a full-fledged literary genre and a phenomenon that naturally belongs to the theater. Drama as a genre has specific content, the essence of which is the awareness of the contradictions of reality, and “first of all, its social contradictions through the relationships of people and their individual destinies.” Unlike the epic, in drama we see “imitation of action... through action, not a story." According to the precise and figurative definition of V. G. Belinsky, “drama represents the accomplished event as if taking place in the present time, before the eyes of the reader or viewer.”

The specific features of drama as a genre are the absence of a narrator and a sharp weakening of the descriptive element. The basis of drama is visible action, and this affects the special relationship in it between the movement of events and the speeches of the characters. The statements of the characters and the arrangement and relationship of parts are the most important ways of revealing the author’s thoughts. In relation to them, other ways of expressing the author’s position (list of characters, stage directions, instructions for directors and actors) play a subordinate role.

The most important content category in drama is conflict. Of course, conflicts also exist in the epic, they can also be present in a lyrical work, but their role and meaning in the epic and lyrical plot are different than in drama. The choice of conflicts and their arrangement into a system largely determine the uniqueness of the writer’s position; dramatic clashes are the most essential way of identifying the life programs of characters and self-disclosure of their characters. The conflict largely determines the direction and rhythm of the plot movement in the play.

The content of conflicts, as well as the methods of their embodiment in a dramatic work, can be of a different nature. Traditionally, drama conflicts, based on their content, emotional severity and coloring, are divided into tragic, comic and actually dramatic. The first two types are distinguished in accordance with the two main genre forms of drama; they originally accompany tragedy and comedy, reflecting the most significant aspects of life conflicts. The third one arose at a rather late stage of dramaturgy, and its understanding is associated with the theory of drama developed by Lessing (“Hamburg Drama”) and Diderot (“Paradox of the Actor”).

Of course, conflict, with all its meaningful ambiguity and diversity of functions, is not the only component that determines the specificity of drama as a genre. No less important are the methods of plot organization and dramatic narration, the relationship between the speech characteristics of the characters and the construction of the action, etc. However, we deliberately focus on the category of conflict. On the one hand, analysis of this aspect allows, based on the generic specificity of the drama, to reveal the depth of the artistic content of the work and take into account the peculiarities of the author’s attitude towards the world. On the other hand, it is the consideration of conflict that can become the leading direction in the school analysis of a dramatic work, since high school students are characterized by an interest in effective clashes of beliefs and characters, through which the problems of the struggle between good and evil are revealed. Through the study of the conflict, it is possible to lead schoolchildren to comprehend the motives behind the words and actions of the characters, to reveal the originality of the author's intention and the moral position of the writer. To identify the role of this category in creating the eventual and ideological tension of the drama, in expressing the social and ethical programs of the characters, in recreating their psychology is the task of this section.

Drama depicts a person only in action, in the process of which he discovers all sides of his personality. “Dramaticism,” emphasized V. G. Belinsky, noting the features of drama, “consists not in one conversation, but in the living action of those talking to each other.”

In works of the dramatic genre, unlike epic and lyrical ones, there are no author's descriptions, narration, or digressions. The author's speech appears only in stage directions. The reader or viewer learns everything that happens to the heroes of the drama from the heroes themselves. The playwright, therefore, does not talk about the lives of his characters, but shows them in action?

Due to the fact that the heroes of dramatic works manifest themselves only in action, their speech has a number of features: it is directly related to their actions, more dynamic and expressive than the speech of the heroes of epic works. Intonation, pause, tone, i.e., all those features of speech that become concrete on stage, are also of great importance in dramatic works.

Everything shown in a play, tragedy, comedy or drama is tied by the playwright, in Gogol’s apt expression, “into one big common knot.” Hence the concentration of depicted events and secondary characters around the main characters. The plot of the drama is characterized by tension and rapid development. This feature of the plot of dramatic works distinguishes it from the plot of epic works, although both plots are built on common elements: plot, climax and denouement.

The difference between drama and epic and lyric poetry is also expressed in the fact that works of the dramatic genre are written for the theater and receive their final completion only on the stage. In turn, the theater influences them, subordinating them to some extent to its laws. Dramatic works are divided, for example, into actions, phenomena or scenes, the change of which involves a change of scenery and costumes. In approximately three or four acts of the play, that is, during the three or four hours occupied by the performance, the dramatist must show the emergence of the conflict, its development and completion. These requirements for playwrights oblige them to choose such phenomena and life events in which the characters of the people depicted are especially clearly manifested.

While working on a play, the playwright sees not only his hero, but also his performer. This is evidenced by numerous statements of writers. Regarding the performance of the roles of Bobchinsky and Dobchinsky, N.V. Gogol wrote: “... when creating these two little officials, I imagined. their skin of Shchepkin and Ryazantsov...” We find the same thoughts in A.P. Chekhov. During the period the Art Theater was working on the play “The Cherry Orchard,” Chekhov informed K. S. Stanislavsky: “When I wrote Lopakhin, I thought that this was your role.”

There is another dependence of a dramatic work on the theater. It manifests itself in the fact that the reader connects the play with the stage in his imagination. When reading plays, images of certain supposed or actual performers of roles arise. If theater, in the words of A.V. Lunacharsky, is a form, the content of which is determined by drama, then the actors, in turn, help the playwright complete the images with their performance. The scene to some extent replaces the author's descriptions. “Drama lives only on stage,” wrote N.V. Gogol to M.P. Pogodin. “Without it, it is like a soul without a body.”

The originality of drama, its difference from epic and lyric poetry, give grounds to raise the question of some features in the correlation of methods and techniques used in the analysis of dramatic works in secondary school.

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