This paper will discuss problems of representation of love in theatre
through the analysis of the idea of "creating a new man" conceived in the
Russian modernism and re-addressed in the practice of postmodernism. From
the example of three plays: A. Chekhov's Seagull (1896), A. Arbuzov's Tanya
(1939), and O. Mukhina's Tanya-Tanya (1997) the fundamental question of
Western Feminist studies on the insignificance of female presence in the
male world will be addressed and applied to the historical and social peculiarities
of the Russian culture, looking at the subject through the prism of Chekhovian
"hundred pounds of love". The Modernist idea of changing the world by changing
Self, becoming ”a new woman” is reflected in the proposed texts in different
forms: from self-perfection through the professional development, to recognition
and appropriation of male social functions as self-perfective tools of
a Soviet citizen to dismissing self-perfection as such, manifesting “the
eternal complications of loving and being in love" (Freedman, 1998,XV).
As this study demonstrates, Russian postmodernist drama is deeply rooted
and juxtaposed with the modernists' major search for self-creating.
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