Little Big Man. Contexts and Intertexts of the Iron Horseman by Alexey Zhitkovsky

The analysis of a contemporary dramatic text involves deconstructing the intertextual references embedded within it, which are defined by a situation of total play with the meanings of aesthetic models and sociocultural paradigms of preceding eras. Plays by post-Soviet playwrights are increasingly analyzed from the perspectives of post- or metamodernism. In this context, the importance of reconstructing the intertextual connections of authorial statements and their interpretations within a cohesive artistic context is particularly emphasized. Alexey Zhitkovsky’s play The Iron Horseman (2022) actualizes variants of the Petersburg text of Russian literature, while being correlated with both The Bronze Horseman itself and the tradition of playful relations of Pushkin’s poetics in Russian literature of the 20th century. Zhitkovsky’s one-act “story of one training session” in the style of Shotokan karate is associated with various levels of cultural mythology. The plot models are built around the ancient Greek myth of Cadmus, who, after defeating the sacred dragon, must himself transform into a dragon, with activations in the reader’s consciousness of inversions of this story in Eastern folklore (the Vietnamese tale of the dragon), in Buddhist philosophical parables (“if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him”), and in the ideology of Eastern martial arts. At the dialogic level, the ironic tone in addressing Eastern themes actualizes the stylistic explorations of the prose of V. Pelevin and V. Sorokin, which are rooted in Pushkinian allusions and the poetics of the Oberiuts. Ultimately, the initiatory plot of the play reveals a direct dialogue with the poetics of chivalric romance by allusively reproducing the episode of Parzival’s victory over the Red Knight (Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival), which fundamentally changes the status of the main character. The use of deep mythopoetic significance allows the playwright to prominently mark the broad sociocultural issues of changes in public consciousness and the positioning of the masculine principle in society in the 2020s.