Evolution from fragment to collage in German-language plays about the formation of a hero of the 19th –21st centuries

Statement of the problem. The processes of plot deconstruction began in German and Austrian drama in the era of Romanticism. By the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries, drama acquired a collage structure. The purpose of the article is to analyze the dramas of E. Bauernfeld Die Republik der Thiere (1848), F. Werfel Spiegelmensch (1920), and F. Kater Zeit zu lieben zeit zu sterben (2002), which combine the problems of the formation of a young hero, and to identify differences in fragmentary and collage drama. Review of scientific literature on the problem shows that, although the fragment of aesthetics in literature is described in the works of M. Blanchot, C. Lavoie, I. Lisse and J.-M. Lachot, the genre nature of collage drama represents an important and insufficiently studied problem in literary criticism. The relevance of the study is determined by the interest of Russian literary criticism in complex genre formations and the synthesis of heterogeneous artistic trends within one text. Methodology (materials and methods). The work uses genre, comparative-typological and hermeneutic research methods. Research results. The article determines that the formation of a young enthusiastic hero is a cross-cutting plot in Austrian and German drama, which predetermines fragmentation and avoidance of linearity preferable in drama. If at the early stages the dramatic text disintegrates into fragments due to carnivalization, interludes and silence, then at the turn of the 20th –21st centuries, the collage drama is formed due to the appearance of a narrator typical of the epic with a pronounced narrative position, organizing and colliding various temporal narrative layers.