POETICS AND NARRATIVE STRATEGIES OF REPRESENTING WAR IN TWENTY-FIRST- CENTURY UKRAINIAN PROSE (BASED ON THE WORKS OF SERHIY ZHADAN AND VASYL SHKLIAR)

Abstract

The article presents a comprehensive literary analysis of the poetics and narrative strategies used to depict war in twenty-firstcentury Ukrainian prose, drawing on Serhiy Zhadan’s novel The Orphanage (Internat) and Vasyl Shkliar’s historical-documentary novels The Outcast. Black Raven (Zalyshenets. Chornyi Voron) and Marusia. The study identifies and substantiates a fundamental shift in contemporary military discourse compared to twentieth-century war prose: a transition from commemorative practices, romanticized ideologization, and the aesthetics of historical distance to the direct artistic reflection of the “war of the present,” as well as a move from broad heroization to factual specificity, narrative fragmentation, and the subjectivization of focalization. It is demonstrated that contemporary authors shift their focus from external battle scenes and front-line conflict toward the internal experience of an individual caught in a situation of total violence and axiological uncertainty, highlighting psychological trauma, frustration, and ethical choice. The narrative architectonics of The Orphanage are examined, revealing how the interaction of visual and narrative levels generates an effect of immersion (presence), while also analyzing the semantic weight of the road motif, the motif of silence, the zoomorphic code (as an animalistic marker of war), and the representation of children acting as a moral benchmark for society. In the context of Vasyl Shkliar’s works, the article outlines the axiological model of the insurgent hero – depicted without linear idealization – and identifies the function of the “own-other” opposition in the characters’ moral self-identification. The intertextual (biblical allusions), mythopoetic, and folkloric layers of The Outcast. Black Raven are thoroughly explored alongside a cyclical model of historical time. Special attention is devoted to the specific features of feminine military discourse in the novel Marusia, where the phenomenon of national resilience and the intergenerational transmission of ethical values are articulated through the lens of female existential experience, somatic markers of trauma, and the conceptualization of silence. Ultimately, comparing Zhadan’s chronotope of the unresolved present with Shkliar’s historical retrospect demonstrates the emergence of a profoundly new artistic perspective in twenty-first-century Ukrainian war prose.