The phenomenon of childhood and the image of the child in G. Hauptmann’s late drama ‘Iphigenie in Aulis’

The article discusses the perception by the late Hauptmann of the phenomenon of childhood and the closely related image of the child, which reveals the specificity of the playwright’s worldview in comparison with his early works, contributes to clarification of the complex creative process connected with the expansion of the writer’s conceptual horizon. Hence the objectives of the present study are as follows: to identify the principles underlying the poetics of Hauptmann of the late period; to reveal the playwright’s theoretical positions concerning the phenomenon of childhood and the image of the child; to substantiate the nature of Hauptmann’s existential searches connected with the paradigm of continuous renewal; to provide reflections on the game model presented by Hauptmann as a dramatic genesis of childishness; to show, using the example of the drama Iphigenie in Aulis, the unique thinking of the girlchild, the acquisition by the game consciousness of a new existence. The analysis revealed contextual Hauptmann’s connections with the game discourse of his epoch (Groos, Buytendijk, Huizinga), the dramatist’s close world-view contact with 18th-century game traditions (Goethe, Schiller). The modernization of their basic positions concerns the ontological perception of game as the quintessence of childishness, which, being a property of the soul, is perceived by Hauptmann as a divine cosmic principle. The child, creating playing being in his/her consciousness, contributes to the manifestation of the game world essence. The study has found that the triad (unconscious childhood, the loss of unconscious childhood, conscious childhood), represented in theoretical works and only partially presented in children’s dramas of the early period, receives a full poetic embodiment in the late drama Iphigenie in Aulis. The creative idea of a child’s continual reflection, leading to a new spiritual birth, manifested in the early dramas through the game metaphor of sunlight, is reproduced in the later works as a moonlight gameplay. Iphigenie the child, having created a night proto-drama in her head, deprived of childhood in the visible being, finds it in the night darkness, which becomes her protection and support.