ABSTRACT
Viktor Slavkin, who was born in 1935, belongs to the so-called “new wave” of Russian dramatists who emerged in the late 1970s and the 1980s and who include Aleksandr Galin, Liudmila Razumovskaia, and Liudmila Petrushevskaia. Slavkin himself considers that his career as a dramatist began on 28 April 1979, the date of the première of his first full-length play Vzroslaia doch’ molodogo cheloveka (A young man’s grown-up daughter) at the Moscow Stanislavskii Theatre. It would be quite possible to interpret Slavkin’s early short plays as Aesopian commentaries on various aspects of Soviet life. Apart from the question of loneliness and isolation, which is examined in all of the plays, an important recurrent theme which was also to be significant in Slavkin’s full-length plays of the late 1970s and 1980s is that of self-reappraisal in middle age and the search for self-definition.
