ARTISTIC ORIGINALITY OF E. ZAGREBIN's PLAYS

One of the brightest representatives of the pleiad of Udmurt writers of the "Sixties" is Egor Egorovich Zagrebin (1937-2015), who left a deep mark on national literature and culture, especially in drama. The article examines the features of E. Zagrebin's creative individuality and dramatic skill based on the material of his most significant, representative plays: the drama "Mynam yaratone tatyn" ("My love is here"), the comedy (vaudeville) "Nastok no Istok" ("Stepan and Nastya"), the tragedy of "Esh-Terek". These plays are characterized by new substantive and formal elements that have become productive for the subsequent development of Udmurt drama. Without setting the task to comprehensively characterize the skill of E. Zagrebin as a playwright, the article attempts to highlight the following components of this issue: the author's worldview, the plot-compositional construction of the analyzed plays; the principles of typification of characters' images, and the structure of artistic conflict. E. Zagrebin's plays combine purely dramatic techniques with those of lyric poetry and prose, and theatrical conventions with real signs of the time. E. Zagrebin was one of the first in the Udmurt dramaturgy of the second half of the XX century who turned to understanding the life of the people through the analysis of everyda life of an ordinary person. A remarkable event in the literary and theatrical life of the republic at the turn of the XX-XXI centuries was the staging of E. Zagrebin's tragedy "Esh-Terek", which reflected the writer's interest in the role of a historical personality in critical epochs. With this play, the author implicitly addressed the topical issues of our time.