2010, Vol.21, No.

Cross-Cultural Studies 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.52

pISSN : 1598-0685 / eISSN : 2671-9088
https://journal.kci.go.kr/ccs

Young Tolstoy, when he was an already well-known writer, accomplished his first overseas travel in 1857, which gave him imaginable opportunities to compare his country's social strata with others such as serfdom, monarchical Russia and industrial and capital Europe. The present story <From the Notes of Prince D. Nekhljudov. Lucern> is, indeed, the work which is influenced by those experiences by young Tolstoy during his first journey into Europe. Written in the form of booklet-like-small-piece, rather than an artistic work, the text presents the writer's severe criticism on the world of nature and civilization. Close to the nature itself, narod are those common people for Tolstoy, and they represent love, while the nature creates a necessity to love, hope and bottomless happiness of life. On the contrary, the civilized or civilization itself is considered artificial, willy, reasonal, and erotic congruity among people. For the writer, the most unsafe and ugly, seamy side of the westernized society is a lack of necessity to unify people to people. Though in its early embryonic stage, young Tolstoy's worldview is reflected in this work, especially his sharp tongue on the western people and their society is also detected when the write imposes his message under the mask of a gypsy singer. In addition, the narrator who seems an obvious Tolstoy's mouthpiece delivers his own ideas and impression on the western world, history, art, and literature. For this very reason, the present work contains numerous signs from which the reader is able to interpret, understand,and figure out what young Tolstoy imposes for his work.

Even though Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño's novel Amulet was inspired by a historical account, it significantly rewrites the story as well as redefines the people who witnessed the history. This novel focuses on the Uruguayan poet Auxilio Lacouture, the self-anointed “mother of Mexican Poetry”. She is trapped in a bathroom at the UNAM in Mexico City for thirteen days while the army storms the campus for the repression of the student movement, which was decreed by the sinister Díaz Ordaz and culminated in the holocaust of Tlatelolco. In the space isolated from the outside world, Auxilio attempts to reconstruct the past and to describe the future through an illogical exercise of times. In the meantime, her temporal recollections finally approach the definition of a generation whose historical experience is crucially marked by the key year of 1968, when the novel is set. The only one who remained on the campus, she defends the university's autonomy only by reading and writing poetry. The novel ends in a scene densely imbued with allegorical imagination, by which the author endeavors to justify her generation, more concretely, “the peoples without history”, as defined by bohemian poets. The protagonist represents, in some sense, an allegory of the innocence and truth of the history. Her existence per se manifestly demonstrates the power of literature because the literature within this novel in short becomes the most resilient amulet resisting the political violence in an era of increasing madness.

This paper is focused on splitting of the first Soviet theatre, MKhAT and collapse of Soviet theatre. A close attention has been paid to Art Theatres's circumstances leading to splitting, critical conscience about division between ideal and real theatres and other concrete situation before the verge of collapse. Administrative reform of the Soviet theatre at the period of Perestroika and Glasnost', its results and conflicts, occurred in the process of transition into market system. These are considered under the premise of that the problems of MKhAT were not so different to the other soviet theatres at that time. As it is known that Moscow Art Theatre is a symbol of Russian theatre. And the status of MKhAT as a symbol of Russian theatre had formulated not only the well-known Stanislavsky' system and his legendary performance The Seagull, Three Sisters etc. It was made by party's effort to make MKhAT as the first Soviet theatre and by directors, artists and critics, they had believed and tried to protect idea of MKhAT as the 'battlements' of Soviet theatrical art. One of them is O. Yefremov, a former leader and artistic director from 1970 to 2000. Actually from the periods of Sovremennik Yefremov knew that does not exist the ideal MKhAT, excepting myths, legends and administrative attitudes. Nonetheless he chose the duty of MKhAT's artistic director to construct ideal MKhAT, theatre as the best moral institution, theatre as union based on common belief. It is same motive that he had led split of MKhAT. But split of theatre did not bring the expected results. After spliting MKhAT has become almost collapsed under the collapse of USSR and subsequent turmoil at 1990's. And as soviet theatre disappeared into history, Russian theatre became lost its special significance, the super-theatre's idea.