пьеса

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.

The article considers texts accompanying the comedy «The Inspector General». The researcher traces the changes of the author’s assessment of his own texts, the author’s doubts and self-reflection.

The article considers one of the satellites of N. V. Gogol’s comedy The Government Inspector in which an important role is played by the phenomenon of the author’s cunning. All the phases and techniques of the author’s play are consistently revealed; they are aimed at offering the readers a new interpretation of the famous comedy.

The paper examines the creative history of the play Psisha by Yuri Belyaev – a theatre critic, fi ction writer and dramatist of the Silver Age. While working on the article cycle A night at “The Opera House” about theatre history of the times of Catherine II, the critic researched historical sources: periodical, fi ction, documents of the second half of the 18th – early 19th centuries. There Belyaev must have found the material for his early fi ctional experience – the historical short story Psisha.