The Issue of Continuity and Innovation in Nikolai Kolyada’s School of Dramaturgy: The Master and His Students (Yaroslava Pulinovich and Irina Vaskovskaya)

This article is dedicated to the issues of continuity within the school of dramaturgy established by Nikolai Vladimirovich Kolyada in Yekaterinburg in 1993. A substantial corpus of texts exists within both academic and critical discourses on Kolyada and his students as discrete entities. This article aims to clarify the concept of a “school of dramaturgy” as a modification of the “artistic school” phenomenon, and to analyze the formation of the school tradition as a means of achieving continuity. Tradition possesses a motivating force, offering students (in our case, the playwrights Yaroslava Pulinovich and Irina Vaskovskaya) the opportunity to engage in a dialogue with the Master. Since tradition exists at various levels of the artistic process – from style to specific works – we examine a number of substantive and formal characteristics of Kolyada’s tradition that develop in the plays of his students: traditions of world understanding and world perception, as well as linguistic traditions. Thus, the presence of the school creates a space for the dialogue of substantive and formal traditions, providing an opportunity to explore continuity and innovation in the dramaturgy of Yaroslava Pulinovich and Irina Vaskovskaya. The choice of these names is representative, as they (Pulinovich and Vaskovskaya) demonstrate the vital potential for the development of the Ural school of dramaturgy: working with a sentimentalist worldview, linguistic games, etc.Having established themselves as independent authors, these playwrights uphold the traditions of the school whilst simultaneously developing their own distinct traditions.