ИСТИНА

The self-imposed exile which was chosen by Nobel Literature Laureat Gao Xingjian (1940) in 1986 drastically influenced his artistic attitude towards his plays' content. In France Gao adopted a literary style different from politically and socially sensitive plays of the early 1980s (“Bus stop”, “Wildman”, “The other shore”) which were heavily relied on the chinese reality. In France his experiments began revolving around questions inherent in post-war European philosophical thought. “Between Life and Death” (1991), “Dialogue and Rebuttal” (1992) written in French focus on existential problems of the self. The plays visually adopt some traditional Chinese images, but fail to provide substantial context for making them explicitly Chinese. Presumably, Gao's overtly refraining from using Chinese literary tradition, be it in form or content, in the first years of his dissident period could be seen as avoiding “selling antiques” (M. Lee), that is presenting his Chinese roots as exotic commercial product. Nevertheless, a dissident writer is “a retrospective creature” and the state of exile ultimately brought Gao back to the realm of his own tradition, both thematically and linguistically. In his latest dramas “The Classic of Mountains and Seas” (a carnivalesque mystery play, 1993) and “Snow in August” (a Chan play, 2000) the playwright attempts to unfold archetypical situations in Chinese history in panoramic scenes. On a subject-matter level Gao restores “collective past” – both linguistically (the plays follow the written vernacular style) and visually. However, mythical gods' war and the sixth Chan patriarch Hui Neng's life thematic implications are devised to answer the questions of modern man's predicaments. Thus tradition in Gao's case appeared not as a hastily made exotic history, but as a long-time conceived frame to reconcile the old in relation to form and content with the postmodern problems of the self.