Alfred Nobel University Journal of Philology (Dec 2020)
GENRE PALETTE OF UKRAINIAN ADVENTURE PROSE OF THE FIRST THIRD OF THE 20TH CENTURY
Abstract
This article demonstrates one of the first attempts for systematic and analytical analysis of Ukrainian adventure prose of the first third of the 20th century as the unique part of the literary process of the given time period. Some of the works included into the analysis have never been previously studied, the others were excluded from the literary circulation for a long time due to the ideological reasons and now have been «re-read» and this way the gap in the understanding of the genre diversity of Ukrainian adventure prose of the first third of the twentieth century has been filled. The national features of Ukrainian adventure prose have been distinguished in the research. Special attention has been allocated to defining and clarifying the specifics of such adventure genres as a frontier novel, eastern, robinsonade, travelogue, printed series, detective series, spy novel, novel-quest, noir, and gothic novel, horror, chronicle fiction. It is established that in the first third of the 20th century while operating in a pan-European context, Ukrainian adventure literature adopted a few new genres (frontier novel, eastern, robinsonade, travelogue, action, thriller, printed series, detective series, spy novel, gothic novel, horror, chronicle novel), plots and images, themes and motifs that could not be developed in previous centuries due to being under the imperial colonial pressure. The analysis of adventure literary works gives every reason to say that Ukrainian literature has absorbed the achievements of the world, sometimes even ahead of the time. This is very important for the scientific understanding of adventure discourse because the works of Ukrainian literature utilize quite interesting and often innovative artistic techniques that are nowadays considered very important in the overall development of the adventure literature. It is emphasized that Ukrainian literature had its own immanent sources of adventure discourse, the influence of the Western literature in the late 19th and 20th centuries only accelerated the development of this meta-genre in the national field. It is established that in the 20-30s of the 20th century, Ukrainian culture for the first time was able to move in different vectors following readers’ requests for action fiction. Representatives of modernist discourse in the Ukrainian literary process sought to overcome the limitations of domestic literature, which concentrated exclusively on purely national problems and already classic topics, genres, images. A defining feature of the Ukrainian literary process of the 20-30s of the twentieth century is its intensive interaction with cinema, which affected primarily the topics and the genre-style system of literature (borrowing cinematic plots, typical motifs, typecasting, screenwriting techniques, editing, etc.). Writers, aiming to «shake up» the established literary genres, deliberately developed their works on a script structure, using montage techniques, close-ups, multi-episodes, spatio-temporal shifts. The attempts to adapt the canons of silent cinema, where the scripts were often created at the request of the director for a particular actor, are manifested in the absence of detailed portraits of the characters, while the description of their actions is given in detail. Influenced by German expressionist cinema, which also absorbed the Gothic aesthetics of horror, the Ukrainian artists actively used the techniques of creating suspense through chronotope, sound details with the semantics of anxiety or surprise, cliffhanger, and avoiding danger at the last moment. It is noted that the writers of the modernist trend abandoned the traditional descriptiveness, ironized over the outdated images and techniques, literary clichés, offering their own semantic design of the work of art. Their texts are distinguished by their looseness, freedom of play, absolute rejection of canon, bold destruction of the plot as such, deliberate shaking of established narrative canons through chaotic composition, sudden transitions, stylistic shifts.
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