| Summary: | Biography remake in modern Russian drama
The article is devoted to biography remakes in modern Russian drama. The process of the artistic creation of biographies is specified on the material of M. Heifetz’s plays (“Astoria Cabaret”, “How Tsiolkovsky flew to the Moon”, “To Rescue Junker Pushkin”). Yu. Lotman in his works on biography (1985) explained the popularity of the genre through its transgressive position between “fiction” and “documentary”. The Russian “new drama” playwrights reconsider this peculiarity of the biography genre turning it into the slapstick-fantasy “in the framework of one biography” or into biographical “art-mystery”. Modern dramatized biographies are a combination of fictional and documentary trends, where the facts from the lives of real people cease to be the basis for creating the effect of authenticity. The author does not reconstruct the character’s personality, the names (Pushkin, Tsiolkovsky, Soyfer) act here as a symbolic converter. M. Heifetz is not interested in the trajectories of individual life experience; he uses famous people’s biographies as the examples of “monolithic” personalities. In collision with this “wholeness” the important features of reality and its “lack of integrity” are estranged.
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