Nina Berberova’s Comedy Madame within the Field of Literary Traditions

The article explores the system of literary codes and their functions in Nina Berberova’s comedy Madame. Staged by the Russian Drama Theatre in Paris, the play reflected the theatre’s pursuit of contemporaneity and its effort to renew the language of drama. The work may be read both as a domestic comedy and as a melodrama. It reconstructs recognizable emigration realities and conventional plot motifs, yet the conspicuousness of these elements appears intentional. In her memoirs Berberova explicitly opposed her comedy to the tradition of realist theatre. The plot, along with the density of reminiscences, the use of grotesque, and the deliberate exposure of theatrical devices, brings Madame close to Vladimir Nabokov’s The Event, staged in the same theatre six months earlier. In both plays, the inauthenticity of life is revealed through the metaphor of the world as theatre. In Berberova’s play, the capacity to break free from the bonds of literary secondariness and from the tyranny of fate is asserted as a central value.