The experience of reading N. Sadur's play “Ofeni are gone” through the prism of interpreting the “borderline” parts of the text (title, prologue, epilogue)

Our research attention is focused on such elements of text framing as are found in N. Sadur’s play “Ofeni are Gone”, namely the title, prologue, epilogue, and in this particular case, the working term “borderline” parts of the text is introduced to designate them. The systematic interpretation of this three-part segmentation allows us to penetrate not only the deep, implicit layers of the “direct” text of the play, but also opens up some opportunities for analyzing the semantic determination of its plot, figurative, motivic, lexical, structural and metatextual “borderlineness”. For example, the initiatory model of the play’s plot development presupposes the appearance of “extreme” characters: the “borderline” hero (Herman) undergoes a series of tests in order to gain strength for a new birth, the conditionally metaphorical variation of which is represented on the compositional “border” - in the finale of the play, and then in its epilogue. Such way of interpretation, considering the semantics of its structural elements as dominant, requires an interdisciplinary, “borderline” approach, which is advisable to apply to all the works by N. Sadur, which is also a “borderline” phenomenon of Russian literature, combining avant-garde and classical artistic installations. At the same time, the “borderline” of the play is mediated by the specifics of the “embeddedness” of N. Sadur’s dramaturgy in the historical and literary processes, the time of writing the play (2003-2007) and the symbolic and allegorical methods of artistic embodiment of reality of the 1990s adopted in it with access to the level of planetary generalizations. There is a genre commensurability with that of tragedy and the “inscribability” of the play in a wide general cultural context.