레프 톨스토이의『계몽의 열매』에서 사건과 상황

Abstract

This article is devoted to study the event and situation of L. Tolstoy’s play『The Fruits of Enlightenment』. The play satirizes the unenlightened attitudes towards the spiritualism amongst the Russian landed aristocracy. The theme of the play and Tolstoy’s intention are realized through the presentation of event and the focusing of situation. The event in『The Fruits of Enlightenment』is centered on the spiritualism experiment. Three farmer representatives who are accredited from Kursk, are to receive the signature of a land purchase contract, subject to a partial payment of purchase price. Landowner Leonid Fedorovich, who refuses to sign on, devotes himself but to preparing for a spiritualism experiment. The contract signing and the spiritualism experiment, which were actually the unrelated, independent acts of the play, are incorporated into an event by Tanya's intrigue. In the process of realization of intrigue, Tanya moves beyond subspace of dependency and passivity to subspaces of domination and activeness. As Lotman mentioned about the plot, Tanya, a dynamic person, invades a forbidden area across a boundary, what leads to the comic inversion, where employee rules and employer is subordinated: Tanya’s intrigue develops into the event of play. The success of land purchase and the proclamation of marriage are dramatic devices, which guarantee the cheerfulness, laughter, optimism and utopian prospect of the comedy as a whole. Also, the event, developed with the spiritualism experiment, causes satire effect on pseudoscience and superstition including spiritualism. The focusing of the situation is centered on the first act of the play. The act 1 is considerably larger and longer than the other acts; the scenes are subdivided; the first act consists of independent episodes, which lose the relationship with each other and are arranged in an fragmentary, exclusive manner, because the purpose and interests of the characters do not come from a common, same motif. The scenes of act 1 focus the morning routine and scenery of the Moscow mansion as a whole. In this respect, the unity of the situation, rather than the unity of the events, is dominant in the first act. Tolstoy was not satisfied with his comedy still after the revision, especially, with the completion of form and the artistic perfection. The reason is presumably because he regarded Gogol's comedy as a model of artistic completion. Soviet studies have also argued the relevance of『The Fruits of Enlightenment』to Gogol‘s comedy. In particular, they paid attention to the similarity of Gogol's「Lackey」 and Tolstoy’s comedy. Despite the similarity of form(the theatrical sketch) including space and characters, the incomplete single-act drama「Lackey」 can not be compared with『The Fruits of Enlightenment』. The lowness of the formal perfection of『The Fruits of Enlightenment』is evident in the comparison with Gogol's『The Inspector General』. Both works have a similar structure in terms of event presentation and situation focusing, but differ in many ways: compared with Gogol 's『The Inspector General』, the event and situation of『the Fruits of Enlightenment』are separated from each other and have lost their organic unity, and as a result they have exposed the low grade of the artistic perfection.