The four elements of nature and narrative: from antiquity to neo-mythological Russian drama

The present thesis examines Russian twentieth-century drama composed by Innokenty Annensky, Valery Bryusov, Fyodor Sologub in the context of Classical, Medieval and contemporary philosophical and literary works, as well as in the context of visual art (archaeological, sculptural and numismatic evidence: Greek pottery and vase-painting, Greek and Roman coinage, Etruscan mirrors, Roman sarcophagi). In my thesis I adopt an intertextual approach to Russian drama in relation to Ancient Greek and Roman epic, dramatic, elegiac and mythographic traditions, which are represented as a single mythological hypertext. I attempt to show the applicability of a narratological approach to a manifestly non-narrative, i.e. performative genre, which inherits a narrative structure from the mythological plotline underlying it, and argue that a parallel system of four closely interconnected narrative elements underlies the hypertext of Annensky’s tragedies. My thesis explores the main variants of artistic myth-making in Silver Age drama based on traditional mythological plots, projected onto contemporary life, the creation of individual systems of mythologemes and motifs, the use of temporal-chronological planes and causal-consecutive connections, and the functions of archetypal themes, images and characters (cosmos vs. chaos, hero vs. anti-hero, love vs. strife). My thesis offers a basis for understanding Annensky’s mythological tetralogy as a cosmogonical universe based on the reception of Empedoclean principles, which accounts for the choice of mythological plots based on the four Classical elements of nature (earth, fire, water and air). Each of the four mythological dramas composed by Innokenty Annensky is conceptualised through an element, enabling the poet to explore problems of psychology and ethics by fusing the natural world with the human soul.