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At the end of the 20th – the beginning of the 21st century there were serious changes in the poetics of drama, defi ning the strategy of artistic forms and features of artistic consciousness. This gives the right to single out the history of the “new drama” in a separate period of the literary and theatrical process. A new book by the Belarusian researcher S.Ya. Goncharova-Grabovskaya “Modern Russian Dramaturgy (late 20th – early 21st century)” is devoted to generalization and comprehension of this period, which is considered and announced in the presented review. The book examines the main trends in the development of the Russian drama at the turn of the 20-21st centuries: the history of the emergence of the “new drama” movement, aspects of poetics (hero, confl ict, chronotope, language), genre-style vector (social drama, documentary drama, monodrama, remake plays, drama of the absurd) – all that defi nes the specifi c features of the modern dramaturgical process. The focus is on the plays of famous playwrights, which have been staged in theaters in Russia and Belarus, have received positive reviews in criticism. The peculiarity of the reviewed book is that it analyzes modern Belarusian drama, traces its connection with the Russian. The book includes overview chapters refl ecting the genre and style parameters of drama, a list of plays, information about playwrights, control questions and assignments. The scientifi c and methodological publication under review is expected to be in high demand not only in the philological environment, but also among theater critics and theater historians.

In 1719, Jean-Baptiste Dubos published an extensive dissertation titled Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture, in which he proposed a new kind of reflection on art. Although he drew on ancient theories, he chiefly introduced a modern perspective of personal perception and individual enchantment to his work, foreshowing sensualism. In Polish theatre studies, l’Abbé Dubos is known almost exclusively through Zbigniew Raszewski’s article Partytura teatralna [Theatre Score]; consequently, his ideas are reduced mainly to deliberations on the possibility of creating a record of stage performance. In fact, however, the eighteenth-century theorist was fascinated by the idea of such a score inasmuch as he saw it as a tool for showing the actor the direction of exploring the part, not in order to achieve a utopian faithfulness of the author’s intention, but rather to analyse the actor’s own personal freedom and search for the truth of the play. The article discusses the main narrative strategies employed by Jean-Baptiste Dubos in the treatise and presents the main area of his theatrical interests and his idea of the function of the mask in ancient theatre and in commedia dell’arte. It also outlines the relationship between Dubos’s concepts and 18th-century theory and practice of Parisian theatre.