Information about the author:

Abstract:

The article examines the creative reception of Edmond Rostand’s play Cyrano de Bergerac (1897) in a number of lyrical and dramatic works by Marina Tsvetaeva of the 1910s and early 1920s, and in the short story by Nadezhda Teffi Cyrano de Bergerac (1926) in the gender aspect. It is established that in Teffi’s short story male and female roles are firmly distinguished, and the heroine’s attempt to play a masculine role is shown as ridiculous: the woman cannot renounce her femininity, and, even if she wants to play the role of Cyrano, she will certainly fall into that of the Princess Far-Away. In Tsvetaeva, on the contrary, the roles and patterns of Rostand’s plays are used as part of the assertion of androgyny of her lyrical heroine and the female characters of her plays, where the highest valor and the highest charm lie precisely in the ability to rise above one’s sex and thereby become creatures of the spirit who overcame the flesh (a motive that certainly is also present in Rostand). Both in the case of Tsvetaeva and in the case of Teffi, the creative reception of Edmond Rostand’s plays is associated with specific “literariness” of writing generated by the selfreflexive nature of Rostand’s work itself.