Speech versus action : a shattered metaphor in tony kushner's slavs

Abstract EN

This paper argues that the characters in Slavs!, Tony Kushner's play, fail to make metaphors and therefore create for themselves inner and outer crises in terms of communication.

Set in the Soviet Union, the play's use of two coexisting modes of language (the doctoral and the ordinary) shatters the characters' ways of thinking, so they become unable to create similarities or to make any progress in life.

Slavs! becomes a microcosm of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Societies, individuals, in other parts of the world are vulnerable to live similar conditions whenever their people lose abilities to communicate with themselves and others.

No progress could take place without focusing on the present, using the past and the future to serve it.

Despite the gloomy atmosphere which hovers over most of the play, Kushner intentionally leaves a slight hope in the Epilogue that things might improve in the future for the Russians and the rest of the world.