scenario

The premiere of the world-famous Russian ballet “The Sleeping Beauty”, composed by P. I. Tchaikovsky, I. A. Vsevolozhsky and M. Petipa, took place on the stage of the Mariinsky Theatre on January 3, 1890, and became a significant event in the cultural life of Petersburg. Since then, the ballet has been performed on stages around the world, undergoing various revisions and updates, but the original author’s libretto has sometimes been neglected and replaced with adaptations and reinterpretations of the story during subsequent productions.

The single sentence by Mikhail Bulgakov about the final of Nikolay Gogol’s play «Revizor» provokes the author of this work to contemplate the finals of Bulgakov’s plays as well. The researcher suggests that Bulgakov considered the Gogol’s final an excellent example of a grotesque («thunderous», as Bulgakov himself called it) end of action. He proves that such type of an unnatural, unexpected denouement distinguishes many Bulgakov’s works.