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p Usually the concept of the tragic is linked with human misfortunes, profound suffering, sombre cruel events or 203 death. Yet if that and nothing else besides constituted the essence of the tragic, then it would be unwarranted frivolity merely to add to the number of human sorrows by representing them on the stage. This was precisely the argument put forward in ancient Greece by the philosopher Plato as an objection to the art of tragedy. However mankind was not to heed Plato either in the tragedies of the ancient world or in those of Shakespeare, Corneille, Racine, Byron, Pushkin and other great artists, and it has resolutely continued to direct its close attention to the most acute and tragic conflicts besetting the Earth.

p It would seem that the nature of the tragic cannot be reduced to its simple identification with suffering in men’s lives. Through the tragic artists shed light upon essential clashes of interests and conflicts in the life of society. It is no coincidence that the art of tragedy is most fully developed during periods of social cataclysms and revolutionary upheavals, when fundamental social contradictions break through to the surface.

p Aristotle’s words "... a tragedy is the imitation not of men, but of action, life, happiness and misfortune" are worth remembering, since the object of tragedy is not to depict the private lives of particular individuals divorced from the fundamental problems of the age in question, but in the reproduction of real tragic collisions, conflicts on a broad social scale, clashes between “happiness” and “misfortune” in their broad, generalised sense.

p Stories of ill-starred love have often been used as the plot for literary works of a wide range of genres, but only a few of these have attained the level of true tragedy. To understand better the reason for this, it is sufficient to compare the story of Tristan and Isolde with that of Romeo and Juliet. The story of Tristan and Isolde was told by a medieval poet in a straightforward lyric poem, that does not incorporate the social currents of the age. Shakespeare, the great playwright of the Renaissance, unfolds the story of Romeo and Juliet against a background of medieval feudal strife between the Montague and 204 Capulet families. The irreconcilable contradiction between the ardent love of the two young people and the engrained medieval prejudices makes for a tragic confrontation which leads the lovers to their doom. The death of Romeo and Juliet is explained not by chance factors, it stems naturally from the anti-humanist essence of the age depicted by Shakespeare.

p In the art of tragedy we are presented with essential features of a whole era, laws that shaped the life of large social groups and whole societies, in a generalised, highly concentrated and taut form. Pushkin’s well-known definition of the aim of tragedy as the portrayal of men’s destinies, the destiny of the people, implies that although in tragedy it is through the lives of individuals that conflict drawn from life unfolds before us, it is the fate of the people that is expressed in tragedy through the fate of the individual. For this very reason tragedy, which has undergone major transformation in the process of its historic development both with regard to content and form, in its finest manifestations always was rooted in ideas of universal significance and scope capable of outliving their time, retaining their enduring value for posterity. Just as a people is immortal, so is art which records its destiny.

p Tragedy is a truly philosophical art of profound scope, in which are concentrated reflections as to the nature of existence, the meaning of life and man’s high calling.

p A profound analysis of the nature of the tragic is to be found in Marx and Engels’ letters to Lassalle on the subject of his tragedy Franz von Sickingen. Marx and Engels start out from the fact that at the root of all tragic phenomena are to be found socio-historical conflicts that emerge and develop according to logical patterns and which express the clashes between irreconcilable, opposed forces. Engels’ definition of tragedy as a clash "between the historically necessary postulate and the practical impossibility of putting it into effect”,  [204•*  while not universal in character and applicable to historical dramas of a specific type, provides a key to the understanding of tragedy as 205 such. It was precisely as a result of such clashes that the leaders of Russian peasants’ revolts Razin and Pugachov met their tragic death in real life, while Prince of Denmark met his in Shakespeare’s tragic drama; another clash of this type leading to the defeat of the real-life participants of the legendary uprising by the Russian sailors of the Black Sea fleet in 1905, provided the compositional core of the film Battleship "Potemkin". The same can also be said of the heroes of the Warsaw uprising in relation to Andrzeij Wajda’s film Kanal. Tragic clashes in works of art reflect the character of tragic conflicts in real life.

p The nature of tragic conflict is, of course, an historical category. The objective foundation of a tragedy, its specific content, the methods employed to embody it in artistic form, the nature of its resolution, and men’s interpretation of the essence of tragedy all bear the imprint of the particular age in which it was written. Not only do the tragedies of ancient Greece differ fundamentally from those of Shakespeare, or the tragedies of Corneille and Racine from those of today, but even within the confines of a relatively short period, or even at one and the same time different types of tragedy can emerge and function that require different artistic methods and devices. Yet there are specific universal laws peculiar to the tragic, that operate at all times, although they may be expressed in particularised ways.

p The great tragic works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and in particular Euripides, considered by Aristotle as the tragedian par excellence, still retain their remarkable artistic power in our day, and not merely as a source of historical information. In recent years stage productions of the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides in the Soviet Union and other countries have again made the heroes of these immortal plays accessible and interesting to modern audiences, and not, of course, because Fate triumphs, but because they are confronted not merely with Sophocles’ Oedipus, but with an Oedipus created by Sophocles together with the modern artists bringing the play to life in the modern theatre. Yet there is no doubt that modern 206 reinterpretations of classical tragedies could not have come into being, if the actual problems that inspired the great tragedians to write these plays did not provide scope for them. A good example is provided by Aeschylus’ tragedy Prometheus Bound, which reverberates with defiance of the gods: it extols the power and unforgettable courage of the hero who, in defiance of those who rule the world, fearlessly confronts physical destruction in the name of mankind’s happiness. Marx maintained that in this tragedy the gods of ancient Greece were dealt a tragic and fatal blow.

p Greek tragedy was, of course, rooted in the life of ancient Greece, a society separated from our own by thousands of years. It reflected the tragic conflict of that distant age in forms which were typical of that society and through ideas rooted in its own particular traditions. Engels considered that the tragic destinies of the characters in Oresteia, and the conflict between Orestes, who kills his mother to avenge his father’s death, and the Furies who pursue him in order to punish him for that deed reflected a profound change taking place in the life of society, the replacement of the matriarchate by the patriarchate. He saw the resolution of the tragic conflict, i.e., the defeat of the Furies and Orestes’ acquittal, as a reflection in art of the triumph of the patriarchal principle «ver the maternal one, a development characteristic of that age. These conclusions Engels drew from a profound analysis of Greek tragedy, from comparisons of their subject matter with the life of the times, and from careful definition of the conflict situations in the society of the age which inspired Greek tragedy. The ideas bear directly upon the Oresteia but possess at the same time broader, more fundamental implications. They are methodologically significant and provide a model for analysis of the conflict situations in real life, which underlie the conflicts to be found in tragic art.

p However, these real-life conflicts, these actual contradictions which are apprehended by us today, were beyond the grasp of the men of the ancient society. Marx wrote: "Ignorance is a demon, we fear that it will yet be the 207 cause of many a tragedy; the greatest Greek poets rightly depicted it as tragic fate in the soul-shattering dramas of the royal houses of Mycenae and Thebes.”  [207•* 

p Indeed for the men of that ancient world tragedy stemmed from the clash of the individual with the irreversible ordinances of an all-powerful Fate. Man was seen as the tool of Fate. In his Oedipus Rex Sophocles portrays the life of a man destined to perpetrate the most heinous of crimes, namely to kill his father and become the husband of his mother. Even before Oedipus’ birth it had been ordained by the gods that he should commit this crime in response to his father’s injustice. There was no avoiding this fate, it was the will of the gods.

p So far we have been dealing with classical tragedy. The crux of the matter here is not Fate, from whose grip even Euripides’ characters were beginning to set themselves free, but the fact that the immutable laws of life, independent of man’s will, operate, which is revealed in classical tragedy of different ages in quite different forms and lent different artistic interpretations.

p Sophocles wrote Oedipus 2,500 years ago. Anouilh’s Antigone, on the other hand, is a contemporary work, which has been preceded by a long history of the genre’s evolution, in the course of which its features and properties have changed, and men’s conceptions of the character of the tragic hero and of the methods for the resolution of tragic conflict have been transformed. Nevertheless Anouilh does not depart from the clearly defined framework: his play contains nothing coincidental, the course of the action is irreversible, the denouement involves bloodshed and follows on from a grave tragic error or the tragic “guilt” of a man not guilty of anything. Certain essential features of tragedy hold good for any age.

p Almost all aesthetic theories reveal in the tragic the profound laws underlying men’s lives. Yet in each such theory the definition of the nature of the tragic naturally 208 possesses a flavour of its own. This stems both from the nature of the tragic clashes peculiar to the age and also from the particular state of tragic art. Thus Hegel’s aesthetics which provided a summary of tragic art in the modern age from Shakespeare to the Romantics, presented the meaning of tragedy as lying in the irreconcilable conflict between the objective circumstances of life and the individual; to Hegel a tragic situation was impossible if the conflicting sides were capable of reaching reconciliation. He wrote: "If the interests in themselves are for this reason such that it is not really worth it to sacrifice individuals for them, insofar as without giving up themselves undividuals can renounce their objectives or come to some mutually satisfactory agreement in that respect, then the outcome does not have to be tragic.”  [208•* 

p Tragic conflict cannot be resolved through man’s reconciling himself to hostile circumstances, if he does not betray himself at the same time. Yet precisely because man, while remaining true to himself cannot overcome the circumstances in his path, and is unable to refrain from fighting against them, suffering and inescapable doom become unavoidable for the tragic hero. These considerations are essential to the concept of "tragic guilt". It is rooted not in man’s subjective qualities, but in the objective nature of tragic conflict, in the very nature of the tragic hero. This guilt or rather disaster can be traced back to the "state of the world", in which the hero lives and which he is unable to accept without a fight. The sufferings, sacrifices and final downfall of the tragic hero are an expression of historical necessity. While guiltless he is stained with guilt.

p In Hegel’s interesting and profound propositions on the nature of the tragic there are still to be found traces of the idealist interpretation of tragedy and the social and class limitations of his philosophical ideas. An important idea with relation to the inevitability of tragic conflict leads to support for a fatalistic attitude to the 209 circumstances of life. In view of the fact that the immutable laws and the circumstances of life born of those laws are part of the nature of the absolute idea, and serve to express its development, any attempt by man to change those circumstances is doomed and can lead to nothing but tragedy. The class limitations of Hegel’s theory of the tragic made themselves felt in his negation of the aesthetic significance of tragic elements to be found in the life of the people, of the representatives of the “lower” classes. Hegel had denied the right to qualify as a tragic character to Miller in Schiller’s tragedy Kabale und Liebe^ and also Karl Moor, hero of another of Schiller’s tragedies, Die Raiiber, who, although himself not a representative of the common people, had broken with his social milieu. Hegel could find no tragic guilt in the actions of men like Miller and Moor, but merely a tragic mistake that could be traced back to their subjective intentions. Hegel believed that the place for men of the people was not in high tragedy but rather in comedy.... Thus the greatest proponent of idealist aesthetics in his substantiation of the laws governing the tragic, excluded from that sphere its central concern—the people.

p This idealist theory of the tragic was critically reviewed in the aesthetic writings of the Russian revolutionary democrats, in particular those of Chernyshevsky. Unlike Hegel, he considered that the main subject for tragedy was provided by the life of ordinary men and women, the sufferings of the “humble”, the profound drama inherent in the life of the people. Chernyshevsky held that the source of tragic clashes lay in the defective structuring of the life of society, in the “incorrect”, “unnatural” ordering of that life. The tragedy to be found in the Russian way of life he linked with the “artificial” pattern of life, with the domination of the aristocracy and merchant class, with the existence of a "kingdom of darkness”.

p Despite certain elements of anthropologism, Chernyshevsky’s theory of the tragic presented the sources of tragedy as rooted in- social conditions. He -rejected once and for all the idea of man’s “guilt”, holding that the idea of 210 the tragic hero’s guilt was a “cruel” one: "Before accusing the character, first pay heed to whether it is he that is guilty of that of which you accuse him, or whether it is circumstances and social usage that are guilty; study the question carefully for it may well be that we are confronted not by his guilt, but merely his misfortune.”  [210•*  Tragic guilt Hegel too, more likely than not, regarded as misfortune, but, unlike the German philosopher, Chernyshevsky saw the source of that misfortune to lie in the nature of the life of society and, what is particularly important, he did not regard the existence of social conditions giving rise to life’s tragedies as something pre-ordained and unavoidable. "What is required here is not punishment of the individual, but change in the conditions of life for a whole social estate.”  [210•**  Chernyshevsky’s theory of the tragic provided a resume of the critical realists’ artistic experience that gave rise to an impassioned struggle to improve the lot of the poor and underprivileged. This passionate involvement constituted the force behind Chernyshevsky’s view of the tragic, and in this respect he reached higher than Hegel. Yet while outstripping Hegel in this way, his theory was inferior to Hegel’s in another: he approached tragic conflicts and situations as the expression of all that is coincidental in this life, as the result of deviation from the natural course of events.

p It is here that we encounter elements of anthropologism: starting out from views of man and human nature "in general", Chernyshevsky goes on to reject the idea that the tragic in art is a manifestation of a logical pattern. "There is a doubt as to the extent to which art is right in presenting the horrible as being nearly always inevitable when, in the majority of cases, it is actually by no means inevitable, but purely accidental.. .”  [210•*** 

p Comparing the views of Hegel and Chernyshevsky 211 reveals that neither idealist aesthetics, nor traditional materialist aesthetics of the pre-Marxian variety is equipped to provide a truly scientific picture of the nature of the tragic, in view of their historical and class limitations. Many aestheticians writing before Marx made important observations, inspired deductions and shed light on vital facets of the tragic, yet only Marxist-Leninist aesthetics brought us a comprehensive explanation of the nature of the tragic and definition of the factors fundamental to tragic conflict.

p Aestheticians writing before Marx established the fundamental truth to the effect that tragic characters, conflicts and situations are rooted in the circumstances of life, but they were not in a position to interpret correctly the nature of the social circumstances and conditions giving rise to life’s tragedies. This task was undertaken in the works of the founders of Marxism, who demonstrated convincingly that from the time when society was divided into classes antagonistic class contradictions were the main source of tragic conflicts.

p Analysis based on class factors, that is, definition of the nature of tragic phenomena with due consideration shown for their class essence and their place and role in class struggle was the crucial feature of the Marxist interpretation of tragedy. It is common knowledge that by no means all that is horrible and by no means all disasters are tragic in character. Tragedy is linked with the progressive development of society, with the pain and suffering from which the new society is born, with the destruction of people and initiatives affirming the triumph of those principles which are a source of hope and happiness to men. This led Marx and Engels to conclude that the highest expression of the tragic was revolutionary heroic tragedy.

p However tragic features might also be found in the sufferings peculiar to those forces whom time has overtaken, if their positive traits have not yet been exhausted. In his “Introduction” to The Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law Marx wrote: "Tragic indeed 212 was the history of the ancien regime so long as it was the pre-existing power of the world, and freedom, on the other hand, was a personal notion, i.e., as long as this regime believed and had to believe in its own justification. As long as the ancien regime, as an existing world order, struggled against a world that was only coming into being, there was on its side a historical error, not a personal one. That is why its downfall was tragic.”  [212•* 

p Historical error, "not a personal one", but universal, or in other words such error as is inevitably shaped by objective historical circumstances and in which is reflected a historically necessary degree of development of social consciousness, is tragic. This proposition of Marx’s is a pointer to effective historical method, for it shows how a phenomenon should be assessed with reference to the concrete historical conditions of its existence and development. The nature of tragedy is preconditioned from both a class and a historical angle.

p This is borne out by Engels’ assessment of the German knights of the sixteenth century. It was that class which was the vehicle for the idea of Germany’s national unification at a time when the German bourgeoisie, albeit progressive for that period, opposed it in every way. Engels saw the disappearance of that class as a tragic phenomenon, in view of the fact that while in its decline this class was objectively endeavouring to carry out a historically progressive task, that of national unification. The knights, though representatives of a reactionary class, were at the same time the bearers of a specific progressive principle. It was precisely this that gave historical significance to Lassalle’s attempt (though unsuccessful) to make the knight Franz von Sickingen the hero of a tragedy.

p The historical approach to assessment of real tragedies drawn from life is the key to an understanding of a wide range of tragic characters in art. Without the historical 213 approach it would be difficult to understand for example why the lives of characters as widely different as Hamlet and King Lear are in fact tragic. Yet in such cases sociohistorical analysis sheds light on the different types of tragic clashes. In the first work the clash serves to express the conflict "between a historically necessary demand and the impossibility of its satisfaction", while the clash in the second work stems from the "historical error" peculiar to the lives of the characters. Yet this type of tragic clash is tragic too, because it bears within itself the serious intense philosophical contemplation of life and its fundamental “eternal” problems. In Lear’s spiritual regeneration, it is possible to read tragedies of the present day in which man’s insight, when he is engaged in irreconcilable conflict with inhuman and cruel world, is gained at the cost of sacrifice, suffering and the blood of millions.

p An essential feature of any true tragedy is the presence within it of a positive principle affirming that life has so much to offer. The commonly held belief that the classical tragedies of old were basically pessimistic and presented man with no way out of his dilemmas is hardly correct.

p It is very important to take into account the specific way in which the life-affirming principle in tragedy manifests itself at different stages of artistic development. The tragedies of the ancient world differed from the tragic art of the Renaissance, while the concept of tragedy in the age of Neoclassicism did not coincide with that propagated by the Romantics. Fate was the all-important factor in the ancient tragedies; the central issue in the Neoclassical tragedies was the conflict between love and duty, between man’s personal and social involvement; Romantic tragedies were permeated with Weltschmerz and moral anguish stemming from the gulf between noble ideals and base reality, and were characterised by the pursuit of unattainable ideals. At the same time it can be said that all high tragedy reverberates not merely with strong protest against a world hostile to man, but also extols courage, lauding man’s moral strength as it confronts him with the 214 major issues of the time calling upon him to prove worthy of their grand scale.

p Even if we turn to the models of Greek tragedy, which, it is justly said, depicts the power of Fate over man, we see that it is not man’s inevitable doom, his powerlessness before the blind force of Fate, but man himself that is immortalised, the infinite richness of his inner world, the heights to which man’s spirit can soar and his gigantic potential. While tragedies may depict inhumane conditions of life, they always extol and affirm the force of life, not death. The tragic hero is always active, his element is struggle, and the famous “wisdom” uttered by Faust: "Only he is worthy of life and freedom, who each day is willing to take up arms for them.. ." sums up most aptly the mood that is intrinsic to tragedy.

p In the modernist art of today an important place is accorded to portrayal of the horrors of life—murder, rape, plunder, all manner of psychopathological behaviour, etc. The Grand Guignol theatre in Paris which has now closed down and the horror films that flood the American screen are the most familiar but by no means the only examples of such art. Such art portrays atrocity but has nothing to do with tragedy.

p The piling-up of horrors is as far removed from tragedy as is a miscarriage from a confinement. It is no coincidence that this particular genre has disintegrated in bourgeois art; this development serves to reflect the crisis effecting that very way of life as such, its lack of noble ideals. This does not of course by any means imply that the tragic principle has disappeared from contemporary art altogether. There are numerous works of art which in recent years have depicted real tragedies facing modern man. Suffice it to recall artistic representations of the fate of the "lost generation", broken and shattered by life, disillusioned and bereft of ideals, aimlessly squandering its energies. This generation took shape between the wars, yet its tragedy, immortalised for example in the pages of Hemingway’s works, continues to move us even today: such works represent true art and often attain tragic heights.

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p When we are confronted by the complicated lives of the characters of many works written nowadays—for example the sufferings and hardships that befall the nameless unemployed women in Guiseppe de Sands’ Rome at Eleven O’Clock who become the victims of pure hopes and terrible catastrophe; when our hearts go out to the heroine of Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria after her hopes are shattered, when we are moved by the spectacle of human dignity being trampled upon—we cannot but sense the pulse-beat of true tragedy. There is profound meaning to be gleaned from Chekhov’s comment: "In real life people do not shoot themselves every minute, or hang or make declarations of love.... They have their dinners, merely have their dinners and as they do so, their happiness is realised or their lives torn apart." The tragedy to be found in men’s ordinary everyday lives that needs no explosions, no climaxes, tragedy that permeates man’s whole existence this is what we find in the finest works of art created in the capitalist countries.

p Yet tragic pathos is sometimes lacking in such works of art. In Remarque’s novel Arc de Triomphe, Doctor Ravic knows torment and suffering because he is the only one among the characters of the novel who is well aware of the danger of war creeping up on them all. The circumstances of his life are tragic, yet he is no tragic hero, for he lacks an important feature of the tragic hero—action, energy. He is absolutely helpless, he cannot even transmit his alarm and anxiety to others. Arc de Triomphe is a humanist work, yet it does not evoke that radiant pure feeling designated as catharsis in Aristotle’s Poetics.

p “A tragedy, then, is the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself; in language with pleasurable accessories, each kind brought in separately in the parts of the work; in a dramatic, not in a narrative form; with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions.”  [215•*  Yet the implications of this principle are 216 not elaborated in the Poetics with sufficient clarity and this has given rise to a variety of interpretations in aesthetic writings, particularly in the theory of the tragic.

p The most apposite of these interpretations would appear to be that provided in Lessing’s Hamburgische Dramaturgic. Lessing holds that the phrase "its catharsis of such emotions" should be approached from the moral angle: by means of compassion tragedy sets the beholder free from vices, cleanses his soul from base passions, and helps him attain noble sentiments. Tragedy perfects the human soul through "such emotions", that is through passions similar to those which might live in the soul of the spectator. Tragedy is art’s most powerful instrument, capable of forcing its way into man’s emotions so forcefully that, after banishing from his inner world all that is trivial, it can be a source of emotional and moral strength. As he shares the tragic hero’s experience and feels compassion for him, the spectator is cleansed through his own suffering, and his life is lifted on to a higher plane.

p The "catharsis of such emotions" implies the healing of man’s soul through the mighty power of art. As aptly noted in Andre Bonnard’s Greek Civilisation, to weep tragic tears is to think. In the concept of catharsis the active, socially significant role of tragedy is disclosed, tragedy which calls upon us to feel compassion for the tragic hero in his suffering, in his predicament, and which transforms the state of the spectator himself.

p Tragic clashes in the real world cannot but give rise to human suffering, bloodshed and disaster, misfortune and death. Yet in the world of art it is not the role of tragedy to aestheticise human suffering but to sing of the inevitable triumph of positive principles, of the progressive forces in society.

p As pointed out earlier the tragic always presupposes if not the actual death of the hero at least his deep suffering, although this does not mean that every suffering man or man who dies is a tragic hero.

p In art we encounter repulsive characters whose death should merely be regarded as just vengeance, and has 217 nothing to do with tragedy. At the end of Shakespeare’s tragedies Othello and lago, Hamlet and Claudius all die. However only Othello and Hamlet are tragic heroes: the deaths of lago and Claudius do not smack of tragedy at all.

p This is because the tragic hero bears within himself content that is of social value, his nature corresponds in significant respects to the human ideal. For this reason to a greater or lesser degree he is always a noble and splendid hero, even if in certain conditions and situations he Is forbidding or contradictory.

p Not every hero who perishes is tragic, not even every death of a splendid and lofty hero is tragic. An accidental death which expresses nothing and has no lasting meaning, which has no relevance to the essential content of life and the development of those conflicts, in which the hero is involved, cannot be regarded as tragic. In the tragic we always find a dialectic of the accidental and the necessary. The accidental becomes party to the tragic when it leads to necessity and reveals the same. Tragic suffering and death follow certain logical patterns. They are born of necessary circumstances in life itself. Yet this necessity and this logic on the surface of things is manifested in a chain of accidental coincidences. The essence and meaning of life are always revealed through tragic coincidences. Coincidences such as these have a part to play in tragic conflicts.

p Artistic experience accumulated by socialist realists includes rich traditions when it comes to the genre of tragedy. These traditions are a real innovation. The innovatory character of Soviet tragic art is expressed above all in the fact that it reflects tragic conflicts born of the revolution. Marx held that the highest form of tragedy was the revolutionary heroic tragedy.

p Precisely this theme is central and all-important in Soviet tragic art. This is not only because it is concerned with new tragic conflicts, but also because of the way in which these conflicts are resolved. Soviet tragedy upholds the tragic as something heroic and humanistic. The 218 innovation inherent in Soviet tragic art comes to light in a new optimism. Unlike classical tragedy, Soviet tragedy spotlights the clear pattern and inevitability of the triumph of all that is positive and good not in some distant future and not only as the result of a change of system, but also within the confines of the current socialist era. Soviet tragedy upholds as the ideal life’s progress, life’s advance.

p In the film Nine Days of a Year, directed by Mikhail Romm and Dmitri Khrabrovitsky, the hero Gusev, a talented physicist, dies without even knowing whether his labours have been crowned with success, whether his sacrifice has been vindicated by a new discovery. Yet the film is optimistic in the best sense of that word, although the audience is confronted with a fatally ill hero at the end, who has no hope of recovery, nevertheless it leaves us with the feeling eloquently summed up by Pushkin in the phrase: "radiant grief". The film is optimistic not because the main characters achieve a tangible victory, but because it confronts the audience with humane individuals of real integrity, men of infinitely rich emotions and ideas. The heroic yet tragic nine days of the film possess a rare philosophical depth and radiant humanism that set the film completely apart from sentimental “ tearjerkers” with a traditionally happy end.

p Of course all the tragic conflicts that in the past were born of the social antagonisms found in the erstwhile society are disappearing in socialist society. It provides no scope for tragedies resulting from the struggle of the exploited against the exploiters.

p Yet in the real world of today there is still a good number of possible sources of tragedy. It is to be found not only in the acute conflicts of the modern world beyond the confines of socialism. In the new society as well life spurs on the artist to interpret through tragedy certain aspects of the real world. Alexei Tolstoy held that only a young world brimming over with vitality could appreciate the "full-blooded intensity of tragedy". The old subjects expressed in tragedy disappear, yet tragedy 219 as a genre and the tragic as an aesthetic category do not disappear in their wake. In the new society the tragic can be bound up not only with the way in which men apprehend and artistically assimilate such profound processes and phenomena as the sublime and the heroic; it can also be born of man’s struggle with Nature and the dramas of his personal life, which art is able to lend content of universal relevance.

p Despite the wide range of subjects treated in tragedy, their artistic interpretation always incorporates a common principle, a consolidation of man’s faith in the triumph of positive forces and his optimistic response to the world around him. This factor is essential to all tragic art, in which immortality is asserted through death, the meaning of life is revealed through the downfall of heroes, and the social ideal is held aloft despite the defeat of those fighting for it.

p Marxist-Leninist aesthetics substantiates the place of tragedy in the art of socialist realism. It sets store by tragedy as a manifestation of art’s mature achievement. However, tragedy, while highly important, is by no means the only artistic genre, and it would be quite wrong for all art to be in a tragic key. Tragedy itself is destined not to undermine man’s energies through portrayal of all manner of disaster and suffering, but to foster his courage and heroic spirit, strength of character and spiritual fortitude.

In socialist art tragedy provides artistic expression of the fundamental contradictions found in the historical development of the modern world and upholds the communist ideal as an inspiration to action and an embodiment of the purpose of life.