«Playing God» as a meta-plot of the screen works of M. A. Zakharov

Abstract

The article is devoted to one of the most important aspects of the study of the screen poetics of television and films by M. A. Zakharov — the study of the specifics of the director’s plot of Zakharov’s screen works. An analysis of the plots of individual Zakharov’s television and motion pictures showed that they are variants of a general metaplot — the plot of the «game of God», which is characteristic of European art and is inherent in, for example works such as Shakespeare’s «The Tempest» and the novels «Robinson Crusoe» by D. Defoe, «Dr. Moreau’s Island» by H. Wells and «The Magus» by J. Fowles. Films «Twelve Chairs» (1976), «An Ordinary Miracle» (1978), «The Very Munchhausen’» (1979), «The house that Swift built» (1982), «Love Formula» and others were filmed in the years when the «sixties» Zakharov ranked himself among the «new lost generation». In Zakharov’s screen works, the plot of the «game of God» had a pronounced lyrical character and allowed in an artistic form to reflect on the limits of a person’s capabilities, on the ways of his self-realization and on those boundaries, the crossing of which threatens to lose oneself.