The Ending of Yaroslava Pulinovich's Play “Elsa’s Land” and Chekhov's Sound of a Broken String: On the Question of the Contextuality of Meanings in Dramatic Directions

This article compares two stage directions – from the second act of Anton Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” and from the finale of “Elsa’s Land” by Yaroslava Pulinovich. The basis for the comparison is a lexical identity: both Chekhov’s famous stage direction about the sound of a broken string and Pulinovich’s stage direction contain a segment beginning with the words “Suddenly a sound is heard”. It is observed that in both cases, these words trigger a radical shift in the paratextual sonosphere: silence gives way to an unexpected offstage sound, and with it, the situation is fundamentally altered. This lexical identity entails a contextually determined semantic identity: at the level of the dramatic situation in both plays, at the point designated by the words “Suddenly a sound is heard”, a peripeteia occurs in which the state of the world and of man is reversed. This semantic identity between the stage directions in Chekhov and Pulinovich also provokes the attempt to draw conclusions about the mutual enrichment of meaning between the two plays through the correlating segments. It can be assumed that knowledge of Chekhov’s stage direction can enrich the ending of “Elsa’s Land” with meanings related to catastrophe, understood as a spontaneous, external disruption to the usual course of events. Projecting the ending of Pulinovich’s play onto the episode with the sound of a broken string from the second act of “The Cherry Orchard” may allow us to discern in this episode meanings related to the fact that no matter how terrible a catastrophe, it can be followed by rebirth, for example, through love.