The Power of Darkness
A farmhand takes up with his employer's wife, who poisons her husband to have him and the money under his shirt, and the crime breeds a second one in a cottage where nobody is ever alone. The peasant speech is exact, the sin is entirely domestic, and the proverb the whole thing turns on is spoken by the labourer's own devout father: if one claw is caught, the bird is lost. Written from a real criminal case and banned from the Russian stage for nine years, so that it was premiered in Paris before Moscow was allowed to see it.
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Genre
Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
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Symbol / motif
Conflict
Culture / tradition
Closest analogues
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- 44% · 9 shared