The Impossibility of War Music: The Tragedy of the Defenders of Azovstal in Inna Goncharova’s Drama 'The Trumpeter'

Abstract

The article is devoted to Inna Goncharova’s play 'The Trumpeter', created immediately after the wounded fighters of the Azov regiment, who held the defence from March 18 to May 20, 2022, in the occupied Ukrainian Mariupol, stopped resisting and surrendered as prisoners. The author created a text designed for one actor for the Kyiv non-governmental theatre MaskamRad. In the centre of her work is a musician from a military band, who got into the war quite by accident. In the play, there is a full-fledged aesthetic development of the closed space of the dungeon of the Azovstal industrial enterprise, where the defenders of Mariupol and civilians are located. However, this space ceases to be safe for people, against whom combat aircraft and powerful artillery are continuously used, so the play has an incessant explosive soundtrack, which the protagonist tries to translate into music to create a Symphony of War: for him as a man of art, who does not know much about geopolitics, it is almost the only way to understand this war and one’s place in it. But in truth, it turns out that it is impossible to create a symphony from the destructive reality, from the blood and the suffering of Ukrainians. The common existence of people in the basements of Azovstal activates their communication – it turns out that, having spent so much time together, they know practically nothing about each other. Instead, the impromptu symphonic overture comes from the protagonist’s warm memories of his native city of Kyiv, where his interlocutor has never been. It is important that the play shows the Azovians as people of different nationalities, who consider themselves Ukrainians at the level of citizenship, not ethnicity, which refutes the key thesis of Russian propaganda about the Nazis-Azovs. Plays such as "The Trumpeter" must be translated into various languages and staged in various countries of the world, because hundreds of Azov citizens are still waiting for their release from Russian captivity, and so far no international organization has been allowed to the site of the execution of prisoners from the Azov regiment by the Russians in the Olenivka penal colony. I hope that the play will attract attention outside of Ukraine, and its staging will contribute to international support for the need to liberate these Ukrainian heroes.