“Osman” (1647) by Tristan LʼHermite: a classic tragedy with romantic conflict. On the problem of poetological possibilities of the dramatic text of classicism

The article examines the dramatic work of Tristan LʼHermite, defines his exceptional place in the history of French classical tragedy. Due to the heterogeneity, “eclecticism” of his dramatic writing, which combines archaic elements of the pre-classical tragedy of the 16^th century and new principles of discursive and rhetorical construction of the text, LʼHermiteʼs plays visibly differ from those forms of the tragic genre, within the boundaries of which it functions in the first half of the 17^th century in the works of P. Corneille, J. Mairet, J. de Rotrou, J. de Scudery and other contemporaries of the author. In Kermit plays, the nature of the tragedy of these periods is clearly traced: the Racine (“The Death of Crispus”), the educational (“The Death of Seneca”) and the romantic (“Osman”). In “Osman”, LʼHermite showed the exhaustion of the historical plot, as it was developed by the classic tragedy with its heroic and political ideological foundation, and brought out a new type of hero, whose exclusivity is revealed in his opposition to an inert, undignified crowd and whose power is not evidence of social status, role-setting behavior, but an expression of his spiritual potencies and efforts of will/action in achieving an fundamentally unrealizable ideal (both in politics and in love). Osmanʼs behavior is an insistent demonstration of pride, a desire for absolute freedom in overcoming any obstacles, a challenge to the impossible. LʼHermite has found a new nature of the tragic conflict – the incongruity of the personality with historical time, in its essence antiheroic, absurd.