Excess of Sensuality: Poetics of Grotesque in Plays of Nina Sadur

This article explores the poetics of the grotesque in the works of Nina Sadur, focusing on her dramatic collections “Chudnaya Baba” [Strange Woman] and “Obmorok” [Fainting], alongside a series of interviews and her writings on creativity. It is noted that the poetics of the grotesque aligns with the writer’s creative objective — stimulating individual sensuality and enhancing the aesthetic capacity to perceive the world and life through dramatic art. The analysis delves into rich grotesque imagery that disrupts cognitive inertia and reveals the hidden existence of multiple worlds. The symbolic functions of the human body are examined, as well as characters exhibiting psychological anomalies and their associated peculiar actions, which serve as methods for constructing their own ritual-mythological chronotope and generating a grotesque tragicomic effect through the symbiosis and blending of two theatrical chronotopes. It is demonstrated that Nina Sadur, through her unique artistic poetics that diverge from rationality and scientific discourse, creates a mystical realm within the theater that exists outside the present world, expressing an alternative, enigmatic psychological truth. These poetic moments encapsulate the mystical dualistic experiences of the grotesque aesthetics present in Sadur’s plays. The author concludes that the poetics of the grotesque is rooted in the clash between Nina Sadur’s primal instincts and the reality of her life, reflecting a creative aspiration to restore and elevate individual sensuality.

Nina Sadur, grotesque, Chimera, body, hallucination