The transformation of the images of the main characters in Salvador Espriu’s drama “The Story of Esther”

Abstract

The article goes into how the Catalan writer of the twentieth century Salvador Espriu changes the images of the key characters of the “Book of Esther”, which is part of the Old Testament. An important place of the work is the study of the biblical myth. The questions are being raised about what the specifics are in the author’s interpretation of the ancient text, on which features the main emphasis is placed in the images of the characters and also how the dramatic events of the Iberian Peninsula of the 30–40s are understood through reference to the Old Testament plot. The description of the historical context of the play “The Story of Esther” allows us to conclude that in the second third of the twentieth century, due to the aggravated crisis of ideological ideals and the writer’s pessimistic attitude to human nature, the images of Artaxerxes, Haman, Mordecai and Esther acquire a new interpretation: having lost the ontological basis of life, like S. Espriu’s contemporaries, they find themselves in the center of the merciless vortex of history, they feel the chaotic movement of time. The main purpose of the article is to identify the techniques by which the images of the main characters are changed and the Old Testament myth is incorporated into the modern context.