Don Juan is a dramatic poem by Alexei Konstantinovich Tolstoy , first published in April 1862.
The idea to write a play came to AK Tolstoy at the end of 1857; by the summer of 1858, the first version had already been written. Two years later, on March 20, 1860, he told his friend Boleslav Markevich that he had read the rewritten drama in V. P. Botkin and N. F. Kruze . In the autumn of 1861, after the remarks of M. N. Katkov and I. S. Aksakov , who had become acquainted with the poem, a number of changes were made, and in April 1862 it was published in the Russian Herald of M. N. Katkov.
The drama during the life of the author has never been staged in the theater: in 1891 she was not missed by censorship. The play was first staged in 1905 by the brothers Adelheim [1] . Later, E. F. Napravnik , the musical accompaniment was written for the play.
Don Juan in Tolstoy's poem is unusual - he is not a libertine, not a scoundrel, not a seducer of women, but a man who is looking for love, who does not find her and therefore is disappointed in everything. The mystical plan of the poem is a dispute about the soul of Don Juan and the universe between Satan and the angels ("celestial spirits"), turning into a Christian debate with Gnosticism . Responding to the criticisms of B. M. Markevich, Tolstoy revealed his idea in the following way:
In early youth, he truly loved, but constantly deceived by his aspirations, he eventually ceased to believe in the ideal and began to find bitter enjoyment, trampling with his feet everything that he had once worshiped. I depict him in this second period. Accustomed to deny good and perfection, he does not believe in them even when he meets them in the form of donna Anna. He takes his feeling for a lustful desire, and yet it is love ... Don Juan no longer believes in love, but is endowed with an imagination so fervent that this faith returns to him every time he surrenders to his feeling, and in the scene with Anna Anna He surrendered to him, despite the fact that he had previously intended to seduce her ... He believed in everything that Donna had said, while the commander ... did not return him to reality, to all his past disappointments and to his present skepticism, which he had forgotten for a moment ... Everyone, however, understands "Don Juan" on howl way, and as for me, I look at it the same way as Hoffman: first, Don Juan believes, then embittered and become a skeptic; being deceived so many times, he no longer believes even in evidence.
- Letter dated June 10, 1861
Notes
- ↑ Meyerhold, Vsevolod. Heritage. Volume 3. Studio on Cook. May - December 1905 . - Liters, 2017. - P. 352. - ISBN 978-5-457-37102-6 .
Sources
- A. K. Tolstoy. Collected Works in 4 volumes. - M .: Fiction, 1964. - T 2. Drama. - p. 665-668.
- Letters of B. M. Markevich to Count A. K. Tolstoy, P. K. Shcherbalsky, and others. - SPb .: typ . t-va "Societies. use, 1888. - 369 p. (fr.) and (rus.)